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The Primary Email logon page was not working briefly this morning, this was fixed shortly after 8:50AM

Users may have seen emails returned with:
Delivery is delayed to these recipients or distribution lists

This problem is now resolved. If you received a email that indicated the email you just sent had been delayed, then the email will have now been delivered successfully.

These problems where not global and may not have affected all customers.

Primary Email Team

Christmas greetings all.

We have been working on the SPAM filters today, some SPAM may have slipped through into users Inbox. The filters are back online and normal service has been resumed.

The Primary Email reset password tool is now working. Our web wizards have been working hard and have improved the search and filterable options.

This can be accessed through the Primary Email Portal. If you do not have access to the Primary Email Portal please contact Support@PrimaryEmail.co.uk.

Good News,

Our Primary Email logon box is now back and working correctly.

You mat have also noticed the My School Diary and Open Calendar buttons missing from the Web Access, these buttons have also been restored.

Primary Email Support Team

Our Outlook Web Access went down earlier today,

Good news, we restored all functionality and no emails or data has been lost.

You may notice a change when attempting to logon to Primary Email, you will be prompted by a different logon box, enter your username and password as normal and you will be be logged in, the usual logon box will come back shortly.

This was unexpected downtime and new measures are been implemented to make sure this does not happen again.

Primary Email Support Team

Today a file went currupt meaning that some users are having problems accessing their email.

Over the last few days, we had a problem with one of the online SPAM filtering sites blocking emails from School Email. We where wrongly categorised by the site and had to wait 48hrs to be unfiltered.

This has caused some users to experience bounce backs when sending emails to certain domains, this has been fixed now.

If you had an email bounce back please resend it now and it will be delivered as expected.

Our McWizard email account has not been working correctly over the last few days, if you have attempted to play the Primary Email game, you might have had some trouble with the emails received from McWizard not been in the correct format.

The McWizard account has been fixed and will now reply correctly to game emails.

We where asked by one of our customers, can I stop certain keywords from been sent to pupils?

We went away and worked out a way to do this. So now all our customers can filter emails based on keywords. When a email is sent to a pupil if any of the words in the email match any of your filtered words the email will not be delivered.

The feature can be accessed via the Primary Email portal. If you are a current customer and don't have access to the portal please contact: support@primaryemail.co.uk

If you have any ideas for new features like this one please feel free to let us know: ideas@primaryemail.co.uk

This week Primary Email exhibited at the E2BN Conference in Bedfordshire.
We went down with Primary Games Arena,(http://primarygamesarena.com) and exhibited for two days Tuesday 24Th June and Wednesday 25Th June. More information about the conference can be found here: http://conference.e2bn.org

It was a great venue and very well organised, we would like to thank all the delegates who spoke to us and thank the E2BN for inviting us to a great conference.
We managed to speak to lots of great delegates and companies, we are looking forward to hearing from them soon!
We are hoping to exhibit at the E2BN next year, we will post more information when the next event is coming up.

We have been very busy lately making Primary Email even better, we have now added 4 more fetaures!

Bulk reset pupil passwords - This allows you to change all your pupil passwords in one go.

Restrict Pupil email - pupil accounts can now be changed to only accept email from primary email accounts. Stopping pupils sending and receiving email from external people.

Disable an account - you can now turn an account on or off.

Delete an account - you can now fully delete an account which will remove the email account and delete all emails associated to it.

All these features are available now via the customer portal.

Primary Email now offers additional connectivity, POP3 and IMAP connectivity is now available

These additional protocols now mean that Premium Customers can connect additional 3rd party email clients to Primary Email,
The settings are:

Inbound and Outbound server address for POP3 and IMAP:

exchange.primaryemail.co.uk

You will also need to select either SSL or TLS security (this ensures all your data stays secure) Unsecured connection attempts will fail.

NOTE: Please be aware that if you use POP3 connectivity, your client application may remove emails from the Primary Email servers.

More guides and help will be available shortly from the Primary Email website.

If you are in the UK then the URL to the Primary Email login page is

https://exchange.primaryemail.co.uk/owa

This will bypass the http://primaryemail.co.uk site.

Enjoy :)

Proceed to the Primary Email Login Page

We are pleased to announce two new features of Primary Email,

Custom Disclaimer, schools can now configure a custom disclaimer for their school.

Internal email for pupils, you can now configure your pupil email accounts to only allow internal emails!

Both these features are accessible via the Customer Portal.

We are always looking for ways to improve Primary Email, if you have any ideas for new features please get in touch:
ideas@primaryemail.co.uk

If you are a customer and don't have access to the customer portal, please contact us:
support@primaryemail.co.uk

This is now fixed, to access your RSS feed simply access

http://rss.primaryemail.co.uk/yourschoolscode.diary.xml

IE

http://rss.primaryemail.co.uk/dem.diary.xml


Don't forget you can view your weekly diary in HTML format too..

http://diary.primaryemail.co.uk/dem.diary.html


Enjoy :)

John (is done coding for today and is going out party 2nite (but not till too late cause I'm getting old))

The dem.pupil, dem.teacher, dem.admin and the rest of the trial.demo accounts had a broken function.

When you clicked "My School Diary" you received an error. You should of taken you to the school diary of demo primary school.

This is now fixed :) Enjoy!
John

Hi everyone,

I was doing some work on the spam filters on Saturday and Sunday of this week, some of the work I was doing stopped filtering working on one of the servers so about 7% of the spam we usually drop was not filtered and delivered to users mailboxes.

Do not panic! Everything is all sorted now :)

Sorry about the spam arriving in your inbox!

John

One of our spam processing servers had a glitch this morning and was rather lenient on what it classed as spam. For this reason between 7am and 1pm some spam got through our filters.

We have resolved the issue and put some additional code in place to ensure this does not happen again in the future.

Our fight against spam continues, even with this slight downtime we still have the best spam filtering in any school email solution by leaps and bounds.

Keep an eye on the blog for more info!

you may or may not have noticed that we have had some downtime over the past few days. We had a power problem with our servers at 23:35pm GMT on Monday 30Th April 2009 this was resolved at midnight when the service will have resumed as normal.

We also experienced a short outage at 22:10pm GMT 31st March 2009 when you may have not been able to access your mailbox. This was resolved within 10Min's and service will have resumed as normal.

We do make every effort to ensure that our service is always online, please be aware that the outages will not have caused any interruptions to email flow.

So you want to put an email game onto your website or blog?

We have been fighting against spam email senders for the last few weeks!

A lot of schools have been receiving a lot of targeted/focused educational spam. This UCE/Most spam is illegal, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003. We have slightly different laws to the US.

Most of it is what we called "Harvested". This means that a company or set of companies has set up a "spider" or "bot" that searches the Internet looking for school email addresses then sends emails out to your office or school email account pretending that you have registered.

So we got tough! We have been calling these spammers and asking them if your school has explicitly requested for the spammer to send email to the school. If they say no then we explain the Can Spam act to them and request that they change their UCE/Spam policies to a slightly more legal practice.

Any if they don't? After no response for 10 days we black list the servers they send email from. The fine to be un-blacklisted is £500.

Consider this a Spam/UCE wheel(email) clamp....

Many "marketing companies" will claim you have subscribed to their services by purchasing a product and that gives them a legal right to email you. Often these companies will give you an unsubscribe option, often this unsubscribe option encourages more spam of a certain nature and is well documented by a Spamhaus(trusted source). To read information on unsubscribe options click here.

Since I posted this blog and began blacklisting servers I have noticed my popularity drop with various suppliers and vendors who use this method to attract new customers. For this reason I am considering writing a new add on for our various applications which instead of spam creates a "Marketing" folder, automatically putting marketing into a nice quiet place.

As time pushes forward we are constantly improving our service. During the school holidays (16Th -20Th Feb 2009) we have been upgrading our systems to provide an even better quality of service.
The upgrades are still on going and will be complete by the 1st of March 2009.

The good news...

This will increase the access speed of Microsoft Outlook and Primary Email OWA.

The upgrades will not interfere with any emails or the service that you curently receive from Primary Email.