A New Look for Pobox Services

This article was originally published as part of the Pobox blog. Pobox was acquired by Fastmail in 2015.

A few months ago, we debuted a new front page at Pobox. Now, those changes have filtered into the Services pages! All the same services are there, but we hope you’ll find these changes make the site much easier to use. If you notice an issue or see a problem, please let us know (with a screen shot, if you can — what you’re seeing may not be what we’re seeing.)

Services

The Services page provides more information we think you need at a glance. We added color-coded labels to subtly highlight the services you’re using, and ones available to your account that you may not be aware of. As more and more of you interact with us on Twitter, we’ve expanded the block to show the 3 most recent tweets, and give a little more context to questions that may come up there. (As always, if you need us to look at your account, please email us at pobox@pobox.com ‐ we won’t ask for account information over Twitter, and it’s not always apparent from your twitter handles what account you’re referring to.)

Personal domains are a much more common part of Pobox accounts, so they get their own spot on the Services page now. The spam slider has been moved off the Services page, and onto a page with the by-country blacklists. Most of you update your spam settings fairly infrequently, and we hope placing them with the country blacklists will encourage more of you to try them out!

Mobile/Tablet

The new pages use a fluid grid layout, which means the pages adjust for comfortable viewing on many different monitor sizes. For those of you who use the website on your smart phone, tablet, or any other small screen, this should mean much less shrinking, growing and panning as you try to move around the site. Page sections should flow under each other to accommodate smaller sizes. To reduce scrolling on smaller screens, most instructional text has been moved to the right of the screen. So, if you need more context for a specific page, look for explanatory text under the form.

In the same vein, the Spam section will now adjust the columns displayed  with our best guess for what you need at the screen size you’re using.  You can always use the Edit Columns option to add back columns you wish  to see and pan right, as necessary.

Users

If you own or administer multiple accounts, you’ll find our new Users tab very handy. When you’re editing your own account, it shows Users, for a quick jump to the account dashboard. If you’re editing another user, it shows you the name (or email address, if there’s no name on the account) of the user you’re editing.

Spam Section

The Spam section has been adjusted to make page navigation easier. “Mark this Page Reviewed” has been renamed to the more straightforward “Release Checked + Delete Others” (of course, if the message was bounced, the sender will be mark trusted instead — there is nothing to release). That button has been moved under the checkboxes, making it easier to scroll down the page, then click the button as necessary. The “Release” link has been removed, and replaced with a second button, “Release Checked Only”, so you can release multiple messages without deleting more easily.We’ve also added keyboard navigation — you can tab through the checkboxes, click return to submit the page, or keep tabbing over to the page number and use the right or up buttons to move to the next page.

Trusted Senders

The Trusted Senders page has been completely revamped, to make viewing and editing easier. They are now displayed in a table, where you can view a list of your trusted senders with:

• name
• email address
• when the sender was added
• how it was added: sending mail, releasing a message, imported, or added individually on the Trusted Sender page

If you use it, you can also view “Type” to show whether a trusted sender entry is a server/network entry. (Because it’s rarely used, that column is hidden by default.)

Each entry has a checkbox, which means you can mark multiple addresses for deleting at once. To edit an entry, just click the name or email address, and edit in place. The table layout means you can sort the Trusted Sender table to view addresses that have been added recently, if you marked a sender trusted when releasing something that ended up being spam. Overall, the changes should make it much faster to look at and edit your Trusted Senders.

Refer a Friend

We’ve noticed that more and more of you recommend us to your friends on social media websites. (Thanks — it’s really nice to see what it is you say about us!) So, we’ve added links for Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to the Refer A Friend page. They give a customized link that lets us know your friend heard about us from you.

We hope you like the new changes. As with any site modification, there can be errors or interactions we just didn’t see on our test computers. Again, if you notice an issue or see a problem, please let us know! Screen shots of what you’re seeing are doubly appreciated