The post How to Supercharge Your Community Fundraising appeared first on Aluminati Network Group.
]]>We sat down with Ben Parker, Managing Director of Stockcrowd UK to discuss why fundraising is more important than ever in a post-pandemic world and how our companies can offer best-in-class solutions to modern fundraising problems. The result? Aluminati and Stockcrowd have formed a partnership to tackle these pressing problems.
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Stockcrowd was founded in 2015 with the vision of helping organisations maximise their fundraising opportunities by turning their own existing websites and social media channels into crowdfunding platforms.
Stockcrowd wanted to open up online spaces for financial organisations to deliver their projects and company goals together with their own communities.
“Stockcrowd gives back control of payments and ownership of data to the fundraising organisation” explained Ben, “enabling it to better connect with its community and receive donations immediately rather than weeks later, as is often the case today with third party fundraising platforms. Knowing who your donors are and being able to explain how their donations have positively contributed to a campaign galvanises long-term support”.
Ben wanted to create a way for organisations to not experience these delays.”Money from projects should go directly to projects, with no delays in between. The data of people who support a cause should be owned by the organisation that is driving the cause and not by third parties that simply aggregate and accumulate projects. Organisations that promote a cause must gain the advantage of their digital traffic without sending their community to a domain that is not theirs.” We agree!
The Stockcrowd platform that will be integrated into the Aluminate Community Builder will allow organisations to have more engagement with their communities, to develop a shared ethos and a more personal, emotional connection.

Building an engaged community within an organisation is now more important than ever before. By the end of 2019, there was already an established trend of organisations moving their primary fundraising programmes online. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this trend in 2020, and we expect to see it continue in 2021 onwards.
With everyone moving their programmes online, online spaces quickly became crowded with third-party providers. “This made it difficult for organisations to stand out”, Ben said. “Donate buttons just don’t cut it anymore and organisations need to engage in a more creative way. The fundraising templates and content designs that Stockcrowd offers really allow organisations to engage with communities in a unique and fun way, and emotionally connect the donor to the end cause.”
In other words, the Stockcrowd platform helps companies to bridge the gap that online fundraising has struggled with, namely: the lack of human interaction in online spaces.
“You’ve got to be able to connect people to the end cause. To show them in a visual way where their money is going and make that virtual connection between their donation and what that money is going to do to help the cause,” Ben explained.
Stockcrowd tackles this interpersonal problem in a unique way. Stockcrowd’s platform enables donors to associate their giving not just with affiliations to organisations or institutions, but with particular causes and themes that they are passionate about.
“For example, if a university is performing cutting-edge research into a societal issue such as dementia, they now have an opportunity to not just connect with its alumni but a far broader network of people who feel an affiliation to the cause, in this example dementia.

The partnership between Aluminati and Stockcrowd was born out of a CASE conference where Daniel Watts, Managing Director, Aluminati and Stockcrowd’s co-founder Sergi Pallares met. Both sharing similar backgrounds and interests in community-focused platforms, they hit it off and actually started embedding the Stockcrowd platform into the Aluminate Community Builder then and there on their laptops, between conference sessions!
“The Aluminate platform is the obvious choice as it is built to bring communities together and Stockcrowd provides the engine room for fundraisers to actually take action together”, said Ben.

An all too common occurrence in the fundraising sector is frustration with a lack of communication between the community and charities.
“They
This is the problem that Stockcrowd is able to solve by giving organisations, institutions and charities the opportunity to own their data and clearly identify who in their community is a regular giver. With Stockcrowd, you are also able to see areas of the community with the highest or lowest engagement and make informed decisions based on this. From this, organisations can create agile and robust strategies to move their fundraising programmes forward to achieve their goals.
The Stockcrowd platform is now integrated into the Aluminate Community Builder, adding value to our users and additional functionality that will merge the benefits of community and fundraising.
We are happy to welcome Stockcrowd to the Aluminati community and look forward to future collaboration.
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]]>The post PRESS RELEASE: Aluminati Partners with StockCrowd to Bring Social Impact Capabilities to the Aluminate Community Builder Platform appeared first on Aluminati Network Group.
]]>StockCrowd was founded in 2015 with the vision of helping organisations maximise their fundraising opportunities by turning their own existing websites, social media channels and community platforms into a crowdfunding platform.
StockCrowd wanted to allow online spaces for any organisation to deliver their projects and company goals together with their own communities. “Stockcrowd gives back control of payments and ownership of data to the fundraising organisation, enabling it to better connect with its community and receive donations immediately rather than weeks later, as is often the case today with third party fundraising platforms. Knowing who your donors are and being able to explain how their donations have positively contributed to a campaign galvanises long-term support” says Ben Parker, Managing Director.
By integrating StockCrowd into the Aluminate Community Builder platform, organisations, institutions and charities will have the opportunity to own their data and clearly identify who in their community is a regular giver. With this insight, organisations can create agile and robust strategies to move their fundraising programmes forward to achieve their goals.
Daniel Watts, Managing Director of Aluminati, comments “Aluminati’s clients have successfully deployed our Aluminate community platform for the mission of ‘Friendraising’ – facilitating new personal connections and growing a community spirit that is clearly understood to also motivate financial giving. With our partnership with Stockcrowd, our community members will no longer need to leave the platform in order to financially support our clients’ initiatives. By creating this frictionless donor experience, executing fundraising campaigns will be even more successful.”
The partnership between Aluminati and StockCrowd was born out of a serendipitous meeting at a leading industry conference between Daniel Watts, Founder, Aluminati and StockCrowd’s Co-Founder Sergi Pallares. With both company leaders sharing technical backgrounds, they embedded the StockCrowd platform into the Aluminate Community Builder then and there on their laptops, between conference sessions. “The Aluminate platform is the obvious partner of choice as it is built to bring communities together and StockCrowd provides the engine room for fundraisers to actually take action together”, says Parker.
Aluminati Network Group is a CommunityTech specialist that supports enterprise, associations and educational organisations build highly tailored digital community environments. Their flagship product ALUMINATE COMMUNITY BUILDER is relied on worldwide by hundreds of thousands of private community members. Headquartered just outside Cambridge, UK, the company was founded in 2002 and is privately owned.
StockCrowd is a SaaS technology company whose software converts the website and digital channels of any organisation into its own fundraising platform. Used by internationally recognised universities and charities as well as by some of the world’s largest financial companies, StockCrowd is the market-leading digital fundraising software across Spanish-speaking countries and launched in the UK in 2019. Headquartered in Barcelona, the company was founded in 2015 and is privately owned.
Alistair McMillan, Marketing & Communications Manager, Aluminati Network Group
+44 (0) 1638 676 232 or alistair@aluminati.net
Ben Parker, Managing Director, StockCrowd
+44 (0) 7590 574 955 or ben.parker@stockcrowd.com
For more information on Aluminati:
For more information on StockCrowd:
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]]>The post Rebecca Cedrone Named Aluminati’s New Vice President, Marketing & Enterprise Partnerships appeared first on Aluminati Network Group.
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Aluminati Network Group announced that Rebecca B. Cedrone will become Vice President, Marketing and Enterprise Partnerships effective immediately. Cedrone is a 20-year veteran of The Coca-Cola Company where she served most recently as Director, Alumni and Community Marketing.
In her new role with Aluminati, Rebecca will oversee the marketing strategy and implementation across the organization. She will be charged with growing the enterprise business within the United States while leveraging her existing brand, marketing, customer, and alumni strategy experience.
“I am exceedingly pleased to have Rebecca join us at Aluminati. She will be a key asset for our organization as we look to grow our market share in the United States and within the Enterprise space Rebecca’s knowledge and experience in understanding alumni needs and market trends, to develop the future strategic direction for the Coca-Cola Alumni Community, enhances our ability to not just deliver technical solutions but also the crucial expertise required to make our partners’ communities successful.” – Daniel Watts, Managing Director, Aluminati Network Group.
Rebecca held multiple positions during her tenure with Coca-Cola. Her experience includes media, marketing activation managing creative agencies on package development and marketing initiatives with strategic partners such as Six Flags, Cleveland Cavaliers and the New York Yankees. Her partnership experience spans supermarket, drug and value customers, Burger King and several philanthropic organizations.
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]]>The post Email Service Update 2020 appeared first on Aluminati Network Group.
]]>I appreciate it has been a while since my last update. I’m glad to be able to announce some positive developments over the last 12 months.
I know we have been promising an uplift to our now dated webmail interface for a long long time. Our initial plans for a totally new webmail experience started many years ago but, now, after a couple of false starts, we are happy to introduce a new webmail experience that leverages a much more modern and attractive experience.
New webmail has a completely refreshed look and feel with many new touches including three main mailbox views to suit your screen size. It also resizes when viewed on mobiles although our mobile recommendation continues to be using a proper IMAP connection from your premium Aluminati account to your favourite mail app.
Other enhancements include drag and drop filing of email, full HTML rendering across multiple languages, a much more attractive and usable calendar and address book, drag and drop attachments, full mail filtering, instant colour themes, and more.
This interface has been in PUBLIC BETA for over a year and we had thousands of members opt-in to use the new system in order to report back any issues that our small test group has missed. We’ve had lots of feedback and fixed a bunch of bugs. In fact, 20 new bugfixes and features went live this week – details available if you click ‘changes’ in the bottom left after your next log in. It is now nearing ‘Production’ status and we will be moving all accounts to it starting from the end of April. The previous webmail interface will remain accessible via your ‘My Account’ area for a while longer as a fall back legacy option but all developments from now on will be improvements to this new version.
We are really thrilled to say that over 2019 our service availability reached an all time high with 99.999% representing a nearly flawless year of service. Investment in our new infrastructure over the past few years has really paid off in allowing us to ensure that the service you rely on each day is there for you when you need it. We will continue our commitment to ensuring that reliability remains one of our core service delivery goals.
Last year we sent more than 14,000 replies to more than 5,500 support requests. Our dedicated service team is constantly one of our most praised aspects and this is reflected in the response to our ‘Happiness Surveys’ sent to over 1,300 people resulting in over 92% rating the service ‘great’, 5% ‘ok’ and less than 2% having any complaint. We also welcomed a new member of the growing support team so that we can continue to provide you service that goes “above and beyond” and hope to achieve 95%+ this year.
The last time we reviewed our email packages was nearly 10 years ago. Since then the world has changed in many ways and we are going to retire the current set of email packages to introduce a line that reflects modern storage requirements. We make sure we are realistic with our pricing strategy, making it as affordable as possible whilst avoiding unsustainable ‘overselling’ of actual capacity. Even so, each of our new mail packages will have double the storage quota of our old packages.
We are retaining our package names but will increase their included quotas. Account prices, which have been untouched for nearly a decade, will be adjusted in respect of standard UK inflation rates and our improvements to service.
These new packages will go live at the end of April and apply from your next renewal date.


Over the years we have frequently been asked by members about allowing friends & family so that they may enjoy the same email service. Indeed a recent survey indicates interest from 40% of our subscribers. To support this demand we will be launching a service under its own non-institutional domain so that our members may invite others to join. We will be in touch with you once this service is live.
Over the last two decades Aluminati has grown from a small niche provider of email services for a few hundred graduates to one that now provides a variety of different services to hundreds of thousands of alumni across dozens of top educational organisations worldwide. Some of our members have been with us since the very beginning in 2002 and I am so very grateful for your continued faith in our product and service. We remain committed to putting you at the center of our business respecting your needs, your privacy and responding to your requests and suggestions. As we expand we are adding talented people to our team who will be able to ensure that we can accelerate our pace of innovation across our product whilst maintaining our commitment to maintaining excellent service quality.
Yours sincerely,

Daniel Watts
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]]>The post Reminder to update usernames in email clients appeared first on Aluminati Network Group.
]]>Now that we are in 2016, the old system is being retired, and to ensure that you retain email client access over the coming weeks, please check your settings and ensure that your username has been updated to your email address.
If needed, you can use a page that we created in May to remind yourself of your primary email.
You may also now use email aliases, as long as they are entered in full.
Some background on this:
Our new system is configured to only authenticate using a full email address as the username when accessing your account with an email client (webmail remains the same as before).
The main reasons for this update are both for stability and security.
For an email client to authenticate with just a username, it needs to ‘search’ a few levels deeper in the system in order to match the username against the correct email address. Since email clients connect to the servers every couple of minutes (unlike webmail), this dramatically increases server load and can impact the speed of your email experience.
Changing to authenticate with a full email address instead unambiguously defines the connection account, reducing any chance of a cross-account security incident.
As always if you have any problems or questions, please contact us at help@aluminati.net.
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]]>The post Director’s Report: Inbound Email Server Failure appeared first on Aluminati Network Group.
]]>Our mail servers suffered an outage on Monday which resulted in the loss of email being processed on that server. We take the integrity of our data extremely seriously and this is the first such incident that caused any amount of data loss within our email system. I apologise for the inconvenience this will have caused a number of our users and submit this report to explain the incident itself, outline its impact, explain our mitigation actions and explain the corrective and preventative actions going forward.
At around 9:30pm on Monday 23rd November, one of our inbound mail servers suffered a sudden and total disk failure. Whilst the remainder of our mail infrastructure continued to operate, this server remained offline throughout the night. All of our key servers are protected by enterprise grade “RAID” equipment to protect against single disk failures – if one disk fails the server can carry on operating just fine. On Monday night however, it appears that a fault in the server’s RAID, combined with maintenance work that involved physically relocating that server in our data centre, caused the RAID partition as a whole to become unstable and crash. On Tuesday morning 24/Nov the delay for emails on that server was announced, but attempts over the next 24+ hours to restore the server and recover the data proved unsuccessful.
This server failure resulted in any emails being processed in the queues on that machine at that particular time being lost. After a detailed forensic analysis of the available log data we have managed to recover the senders of the affected emails but the available data did not allow us to see the recipients. Discounting a substantial amount of spam, commercial bulk email and ‘do not reply’ style notifications, we have gathered a list of 2504 senders that we think will have been affected.
We have hand-generated a polite ‘non delivery’ message to the senders of those emails including the exact time that their email was received by our server. They have been invited to identify and resend any appropriate emails. Naturally any automated mailers will not be able to react to this so you may have to take action to, for example: to resend yourself a receipt from a Paypal purchase or to resend a boarding pass.
In response to this we have implemented some changes:
Again I would like to offer my apologies for this incident. This has happened on old infrastructure that we are currently in the active process of migrating all accounts away from. Our new infrastructure consists of brand new equipment offering much greater performance as well as a more robust architecture built from the extensive experience we have gained from operating email services for you, our valued members, since 2002. Thank you for your understanding.
Best wishes,

Daniel Watts
Managing Director
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]]>The post Director’s Report: Easter 2015 appeared first on Aluminati Network Group.
]]>My name is Daniel Watts and I am the Managing Director of Aluminati. Every once in a while I write a report to address our members; covering pertinent topics of the recent past as well as those critical to our future.
In this report:
For a period of around 3 weeks from the middle of February to the middle of March our service experienced a period of notable instability with issues occurring every 1-3 days. Faults ranged from general system outages, SSL certificate errors, missing password resets, delayed billing approvals and email client connection problems.
First of all, I would like to thank you for your patience during that troubled time. Being unable to fully utilize one’s email account is undoubtedly inconvenient as email forms such an important part of our daily life. I am sorry for any frustration caused to those of you caught up in those problems.
The reason for the disruptions are to do with some major systems that finally took place in February. This was the first phase of a large scale server infrastructure upgrade. The last time we did such a major upgrade was in Summer 2009 and it is time again to invest in new hardware to support the growth and future of Aluminati’s services.
Despite many months of planning and testing, there were a variety of problems that did not present themselves until stressed in the ‘real-world’ environment. The majority of these were to do with our having to run a split-database system with database clusters having to talk to each other across datacentres. We needed to optimize various parts of the codebase to account for the longer query times. Other problems were due to having to issue new SSL certificates and these not functioning correctly in certain browsers (especially Firefox) despite conforming to standards. Finally the tightening up of our security caused many of you to stop receiving emails to your email programs – whilst we have always published our IMAP/POP servers as starting with “mail.” “imap.”, many programs default to “imap.”, which used to work. Once we tightened security, these unsupported addresses were blocked.
All in all, over the three weeks following the upgrade work we uncovered 2-3 dozen issues that were all corrected. We are now in a much healthier state as a result and, whilst we will still have the occasional interruption to service, such events are now down to a much lower frequency with recovery times in the range of 10-20 minutes.
I am sure you will wonder if this disruption is worth it. I would like to assure you it will be. Just like our current infrastructure was a major step-change from pre-2009, this move will allow us to bring to bear the latest techniques in service performance and stability. We are investing tens of thousands of pounds in new equipment and taking the opportunity to implement more modern storage formats. We are also intending to implement instant failover which would reduce our 10-20 minute recovery times to perhaps 10-20 seconds (or less), effectively eliminating 90%+ of all noticeable disruptions.
We are also going to be implementing a second methodology which will allow our regular daily-active users to benefit from hugely faster hardware. Many of our members use our email service as a long term archive of their student emails – which is absolutely fine. However, these inactive accounts take up a significant amount of storage that does not require fast access. We will be implementing an intelligent tiering system so that inactive accounts can be moved to long-term secondary storage, whilst active accounts will be on our fastest SSD disks. Our active members will experience a faster and more responsive service as a result.
A growing problem over the last year has been the increasing tendency of large organisations to outsource the handling of their spam blacklisting to 3rd party blacklist management services and for those outsourcing companies to become decreasingly responsive. Unfortunately with over 120,000 email accounts, we do occasionally have users who are compromised by spammers – be it a weak password or a virus on a PC. Whilst we can generally freeze any account exhibiting spammy behaviour, this can sometimes cause blacklisting companies to list our IP addresses. Indeed some of them will block an entire range of IPs even if the actual offending server is nothing to do with us.
To date we have been quite generous with the amount of email you can keep in your email trash folders. Originally this was so that even if you were over quota, you could always have space in Trash to move email to. We expected our members to regularly ‘Purge’ their trash, thus permanently deleting their old email. We have found a very small number of users, perhaps unknowingly, have not purged their trash and as a result have built up many gigabytes of email. Our published policy of removing Trash emails older than 180 days has never actually been enforced but will soon be coming in to play. This should not affect any of you using Trash appropriately. However any member deliberately abusing their Trash as an unlimited storage location should take note and move any valuable email into ‘normal’ folders for long term storage. You can of course add extra storage to your account at any time.
Finally, I hope you have all had a very Happy Easter. As a small ‘Easter egg’ in recognition of the recent disturbances to your email service and to your patient and ongoing support, I have asked my team to credit a month of service to all of you, moving your renewal days forward by 30 days next year. This 30 day credit will be applied over the next 14 days. I continue to feel very lucky to be in a position to serve a unique membership of top graduates and I look forward to completing these service upgrades to further enhance the service we deliver to you.
Warm regards,

Daniel Watts
Managing Director
Aluminati Network Group
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]]>The post A Christmas Update 2013 appeared first on Aluminati Network Group.
]]>All of us at Aluminati and I would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and thank you for your continued support throughout 2013. It has been a pretty good year for us all in all with around 10,000 new graduates joining us across our various university services. We have also expanded the scope of these services to include eMentoring and bespoke website design through our new division: Aluminati Creative.
I would like to take this opportunity to update you on a few things which I believe will be of interest to you now and in the near future.
Last Christmas we shared with you a design preview of our new webmail interface project and received a huge amount of support saying that we were very much going in the right direction. We have been working to make this a reality and will shortly be contacting our volunteer testers to give us their initial feedback. We have completed an early stage release that works with your own email account, allowing you to read and reply to messages (though not much more just yet!). Development will continue on Webmail in January taking into all test feedback we receive. Our goal is to have a public Beta ready for everyone to use by April 2014.
Last October we responded to feedback regarding the more frequent outages we were receiving, disclosing our uptime over the previous few years and setting a goal for 2013 of being available to you at least 99.9% of the time.
This isn’t to say our work is done. We still had several incidents in 2013 and would like to deliver an even more reliable service to you in 2014. We are currently investigating a solution that may eliminate around 90% of our outage incidents. Our target in 2014 is to reach 99.95% availability.
Shortly after our announcement of Aluminati Creative, our internal web design agency for alumni, Pierre Novellie, a Cambridge graduate, comedian and finalist in the Chortle Student Comedian of The Year, contacted us stating that he “required a professional and appealing website to assist in forwarding my career”. Taking advantage of our current member discount, he engaged us to design, host and launch https://www.pierrenovellie.com/. If you are interested in having your own website professionally designed and hosted please contact us.
In 2014 we will be changing slightly how storage quota is calculated and how we deal with your over quota accounts. We have always excluded emails stored in your Trash folder from your storage quota but this has resulted in some accounts having many gigabytes of emails stored in their trash despite having much smaller storage allowances. In 2014 we will be tightening this up and introducing a time limit on how long emails can remain in your trash folder before they are deleted.
We have also been generous with accounts that have downgraded storage. An account that had say 5GB of emails but downgraded to 2GB would now be well over quota. We have refrained from deleting any mail but we now have considerable storage that is being used but not paid for. We will be alerting owners of these mailboxes before removing email (starting from the oldest) until they are again within quota. This is necessary to ensure that our normal paying members are not unnecessarily subsidising costs incurred from those who are abusing their accounts.
Any email removal will be done in an extremely conservative way to ensure that no temporary excess of quota would result in you losing any email.
So that is all for this round of announcements. We have an exciting year ahead with the long awaited webmail launch in April along with a few other things up our sleeves. I hope to have a few more regular updates as things progress.
Thank you very much for all the kind words and support, as well as the constructive criticism and suggestions, you have provided us over these last 12 months. It is a genuine pleasure to have such bright and engaged customers.
Wishing you all the best for a happy and fulfilling 2014.
Merry Christmas!
Daniel Watts
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]]>The post Launch of Aluminati Creative and other service updates appeared first on Aluminati Network Group.
]]>Need a professional website? We can help.
We are incredibly pleased to announce the launch of Aluminati Creative. Using the skills of our in-house design team, Aluminati Creative is available to produce professional grade digital content with a special focus on servicing the freelance and small business sectors in which many of our professional alumni members work.
Whilst many of you use our incredible value Personal Webhosting (from £5/year), for very simple websites, we are often approached by our members seeking something a touch more professional.
By offering a variety of efficient process methods we have focused on bringing costs down by minimising the amount of time wasted by traditional design back-and-forth exchanges. If you have a clear idea of what you want we are the ideal team to deliver your vision at a reasonable price.
‘Prompt, courteous communication ensured that I felt very much involved and informed at each stage of the process, my feedback was actively requested and swiftly responded to, and the team were keen to work with me to ensure the timely delivery of an attractive, professional website.’
Michelle Herbert (Cambridge Alumna)
Freelance Copyeditor and Copywriter
www.michelleherbert.co.uk
A London agency can set you back £10,000 or more for a professional but otherwise fairly simple website. By controlling the delivery process, working with “switched on” clients, and cutting out corporate long-windedness, we can deliver the same level of quality at a small fraction of the price.
Of course should you genuinely need a more extensive and considered approach we can also run the full design process with creative workshops, branding placement and messaging exercises along with a full length multi-step “review and revise” design process.
The results of our member survey suggest that most of you feel we should be communicating to you a little more frequently than we have been. As such I will try to write an update every month (or three) from now on.
In addition to this we launched an Aluminati News twitter page a short while ago which lets us communicate to you during periods where problems prevent you from accessing our webpage. Please follow us on twitter.
Several of you have said that the task of renewing your subscription every year is a bit of a chore and asked if there was an easier way. We are pleased to say that our integration with online direct debit provider GoCardless.com has proved successful with nearly 200 direct debit mandates being approved since November.
If you wish to set up a direct debit please log in to your My Account area and click Payment Portal. Select Direct Debit Subscriptions and set up a New Subscription. Your next subscription will then be taken automatically, avoiding the hassle of sending a cheque or typing in a long credit card number.
Of course all payments by Direct Debit are completely protected by the Direct Debit Guarantee!
Did you know you can add on POP access to the free webmail account? Or double your email quota for just £5/year? For those of you who didn’t, check out the bolt-ons that are available to add on any time to your email account subscription. Within My Account just click on Upgrade Subscription next to the email account you wish to upgrade.
As part of our drive to deliver a service you can depend on we have set a target of 99.9% uptime for 2013. January suffered from two short incidents but these were resolved quickly enough for us to remain on target so far with a January uptime of 99.97%. For calculation purposes, the time involved for partial outages & degradation in performance is taken at 50%.
By publishing these figures on a regular basis we hope to communicate the importance we place on providing a service that is there when you need it.
Yours sincerely.
Daniel Watts
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]]>The post New Webmail Tour appeared first on Aluminati Network Group.
]]>Further to the sneak preview I included in the last update, I am delighted to invite you to take a very brief guided tour of our new webmail interface at some point over the Christmas period. We have been working on this full redesign over the last few months and have completed a front-end design concept that is partly interactive. Please note that this is NOT a complete build and that the tour will guide you through a very specific sub-set of the functionality. We hope to obtain some general feedback from you and would really appreciate any comments you have about the direction we are heading We are aiming to use the very latest browser technologies including HTML5 and javascript and as such will require reasonably up to date browsers for this tour and for the full version in future. The current aged webmail interface will continue to be available to support older browsers.
The emphasis on the new webmail redesign has been on:
The number one request from you has been to increase the responsiveness and speed of webmail. This version will be using intelligent techniques to not just make the service run faster but also make your experience FEEL really smooth with the ultimate aim of creating a sense of flow.
We have been collecting requests from you over the last few years and intend to have a steady implementation of these into new webmail. Our first launch will support the core email functions but new functionality will be added every few weeks from your list of suggestions.
By any measure, the current version of webmail is looking dated. We have redesigned webmail from the ground up to look fresh and modern to give you an optimized, yet visually comfortable, experience. Please do take 3-5 minutes to take our tour. If you can spare a few more minutes you ‘ll also have the option to answer a few more questions about the interface to help guide our understanding.
With best wishes for Christmas and the New year.

Daniel Watts
Managing Director
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