LuxSci's software solution: our software on your servers. The LuxSci Platform is a version of the LuxSci Email and Web System designed for you, the Customer, to be able to deploy and manage email and web systems in your own datacenter(s). Each deployment of the LuxSci Platform is custom tailored to meet your needs and offers options for future revisions. You run the servers and provide the support. We provide the software, training, and backup paid support.

Read more:

• The LuxSci Platform

By far, the most common dedicated environment for outsourcing your email or web services to LuxSci on a server dedicated to you. This provides all of the same great LuxSci services with full support and has the advantages (over a shared environment) of:

• More cost effective for large amounts of disk space, users, or bandwidth
• A better Service Level Agreement (SLA)
• No chance of other LuxSci accounts affecting your server's performance or availability
• More inherent data privacy and secrity due to a physical separation of your services and data on to your own private server.
• More flexibility and customizability in the services running on your servers, your access to it, the configuration of your firewall, etc.
• Legitimate bulk emailing is permitted from dedicated servers, where as it is significantly restricted on shared servers.
• Customized backups and special redundancy options.

Read more:

• Dedicated Email Servers
• Dedicated Web Hosting Servers

Yous can purchase multiple dedicated servers in cases if you need:

• Multiple email servers due to redundancy requirements or due to the amount of storage and/or users to be hosted
• Multiple web servers for load balanced or mirrored configurations
• Dedicated WebMail servers to isolate your WebMail access from that of all other LuxSci customers.
• Dedicated inbound email filtering servers to isolate your email flow from that of all other LuxSci customers.
• Globally redundant servers

LuxSci can set up a dedicated server "POD" for you. A "POD" is an outsourced set of servers that are dedicated to your organization and which operate independently of all LuxSci's normal servers and of all of LuxSci's other clients.

With your own POD, you have the ability to scale to any size and to have an infrastructure that is completely customized and branded for you.

Read more:

• Dedicated Server PODs

• Article: The Case For Email Security
• Article: Mitigating Threats To Your Email Security and Privacy
• Free Survey: Email Infrastructure, Security, and Cost Analysis

• Secure Email - WebMail, POP, IMAP and SMTP encrypted using SSL; inbound email servers also support TLS for encryption on inbound email.
• Ultra-Secure Email - End-to-End Email Encryption via SecureLine.
• Privacy - a clear and strict privacy policy and anonymous SMTP.
• Auditing - View IMAP, POP, SMTP, and WebMail login histories for every user. Includes login IP address, connection security , and more.
• Secure Collaboration - PGP encrypted entries with complete access control and access tracking are available in our eJournal and Document Management WebAides.
• Secure Web - Web site hosting with SSL
• Consulting - security for web sites, applications, and communications.
• Xpress - Alternate WebMail interface that doesn't use cookies or JavaScript, for maximum security.

The SecureLine End-To-End Email Encryption Service is a service provided by LuxSci that allows its users to easily send and receive secure email messages to and from anyone on the Internet who has an email address - no matter what kind of email software or service that correspondent has and no matter how insecure that correspondent's current email services are!

SecureLine provides services compatible with PGP, S/MIME as well as a secure message "Escrow" service that can be used to communicate securely with anyone.

See Also:

• SecureLine End-To-End Email Encryption Service

Secure WebMail: Your passwords and the contents of all of your messages are encrypted via SSL (Secure Socket Layer) when communicate with our WebMail application. No one can eavesdrop, and you know for sure that you are communicating with LuxSci!

Additionally, you can use our optional visual keyboard to enter your password using your mouse when logging into our WebMail portal. This tool helps you mitigate the possibility that spyware running on your computer (or the untrusted computer in the Internet Cafe that you may be using) could capture your password and deliver it to unauthorized people.

Secure IMAP and POP: Regular IMAP and POP are insecure in that your username, password, and all your messages are sent back and forth to the email server in "plain text" so anyone listening in can see your messages and discover your password. With Secure IMAP and POP over SSL, all of this information is encrypted so that no one can eavesdrop or discover your password!

Secure, Authenticated SMTP: Regular SMTP is insecure in the same way that regular IMAP and POP are, so anyone listening in can see your "plain text" messages and discover your password! With Secure SMTP, all of this information is encrypted so that no one can eavesdrop or discover your password! Our SMTP Server also requires authentication for SMTP Relaying so that you must send your username and password in order to send messages to addresses not managed by our servers. This protects you and us from our servers being used from the sending of Spam.

Our secure SMTP services are provided via both TLS (Transport Layer Security; STARTTLS for SMTP) and SSL, and are thus compatible with all email clients that support one of these mechanisms.

Secure, Anonymous SMTP: Use our secure anonymous SMTP server to have all information about your computer, its Internet address, and your email client stripped from outgoing email messages. This provides enhanced privacy: you recipients will have no way of determining where you are sending your email from -- they will only be able to track the messages back to LuxSci's servers. Without this, recipients could use your computer address information to determine your physical location - the region, city, or even the address!

Enforced use of SSL: Account administrators can choose to force their users to only connect to our email services (i.e. WebMail, POP, IMAP, and SMTP) over SSL. When the account administrator enables this option by checking a single checkbox in his/her account, all account users will be denied access to these services unless they connect over SSL-secured channels. Thus, enforcing policies regarding security use is very easy.

Secure Inbound Email with TLS: LuxSci's inbound email servers support "Transport Layer Security - TLS". This allows email sent to you from other companies to be encrypted and secured during transit from their servers to LuxSci's servers, assuming the sender's servers support this feature. This also means that any email internally from one user to another on LuxSci is secured during transport.

Login/Access Auditing: We track all logins to your account via POP, IMAP, SMTP, and WebMail. This includes the exact time and the IP address used, among other information. This auditing information is available to you, your account administrator, and technical support at all times. You can easily check if unwanted people or programs are logging into your accounts.

Auditing of Email Sending: We track all messages sent from WebMail, your email servers (via SMTP), and your web sites. This allows you, your administrator, and our support team to see what email messages are being sent when and from where. It also allows us to proactively stop Spam attempts -- even if they are unintentional or the result of web site insecurity. Note, records of message content are not available to your administrators or our standard support teams, so this auditing does not tread on privacy concerns.

Incoming Email Attack Guard: Attack Guard protects your messaging infrastructure from Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and other threats by the real-time monitoring and analysis of email traffic patterns. Dictionary attacks, mail bombs, email flooding and other attacks designed to interrupt service or harvest corporate or personal email addresses can be blocked with real-time detection. Additionally, the service scans the incoming Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) stream for abnormalities in protocol compliance and abuse. This service is available to subscribers of our Email Defense service.

Customizable WebMail Session Timeouts: Account administrators and users can customize their WebMail session timeout from the default of 2 hours to anything between 5 minutes and 8 hours. Account administrators can optionally enforce that user timeouts are no longer than the account-wide default.

LuxSci provides account administrators with a "Maximum Security" button that allows them, in one click, to configure all of the options in their account to settings that ensure maximal security. This configures such things as forced use of SSL, strong passwords, and forced use of SecureLine (if you have purchased it) with S/MIME certificates.

Account managers can also contact support to have these settings "Locked Down" so that no one in the account can alter them without contacting support directly, getting approval, and leaving an audit trail.

If you want maximal email security and the assurance that it is setup correctly and cannot be cirumvented, this is for you.

LuxSci provides an alternate secure members' web portal (the Xpress members' portal). Not only does the Xpress portal use minimal graphics for maximal speed, but it does not use cookies or JavaScript at all and suppresses some of the features of the full portal that may put you at risk, like viewing HTML attachments inline. The Xpress portal supports most of the features of the full members' portal (including WebMail, technical support, account administration, and file management facilities), and provides maximal browser compatibility and security.

It is your choice if and when you use the Xpress portal or the Full portal (which does use cookies, JavaScript and more graphics). While the Xpress portal is faster and more secure, the full portal is more user friendly and somewhat more fully featured.

See Also:

• About the Xpress portal.

LuxSci's WebAides allow you to create a variety of collaboration instruments such as journals, bulletin boards, file archives. LuxSci ensures the security of your data in many ways, including:

• PGP Encryption. You can choose to encrypt individual eJournal entries and attachments using PGP encryption. Supports the creation of personal and group PGP keys, the specification of the recipients of encrypted data on a per-entry basis, and verification of digital signatures on all encrypted content. Entries encrypted via PGP are very secure. Even the LuxSci technical staff cannot access their content without access to your PGP key password (which is never saved in plain text on our servers).
• Access Tracking. You can enable access tracking on your eJournals so that users can see, for every entry, who created, viewed, or edited the entry and when.
• Security & Access Control. Only people with a login to Lux Scientiae's web site can possibly access your eJournals (They are not public). You can also determine exactly who has permission to view your eJournal, add entries, edit entries, make comments, and administer your eJournal. You can specify this per user, per user group, and/or per account basis. You can share your eJournals with other members of your account and/or members of other LuxSci accounts -- you decide.

As far as HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is concerned, email compliance implies "securing patient records containing individually identifiable health information so that they are not readily available to those who do not need them". It does not specify what technologies must be used to do this, leaving that decision up to the individual health care organizations.

LuxSci allows health care and other organizations to meet these goals by providing:

• Encrypted communications ensuring that no one cane eavesdrop on your WebMail or email sessions.
• Login auditing so that you can track who accessed what services when and from where.
• Strict privacy policies ensuring that noone will access your data without your explicit consent.
• Secured servers ensuring that noone except you has access to your email data.
• Easy integration: LuxSci's security services work with any modern web browser or email client and are simple to configure.

See also:

• HIPAA Security Management in Electronic Communications.

With LuxSci secure web hosting, you can protect your web site with SSL (Secure Socket Layer). You can provide the certificate or we can help you obtain one. Our MySQL databases support encrypted connections using TLS to protect your data stream when you connect from remote locations.

Our consulting services can help you create secure and robust login and authentication modules for your web site and protect your secure files from prying eyes. We can also help you implement encryption, and public key (PKI) solutions in your web site for maximum enhanced security.

Secure web hosting comes with all the features of secure email!

See also:

• Recipe: Completely Secure Collection of Web Form Data Using SSL and PGP

In addition to our access controls which allow you to specify who can see your information, LuxSci has a very strict privacy policy - our technical support staff will never access your email or WebAides without your prior consent.

Using the AJAX technique for web-based programming, LuxSci's WebMail runs at speeds that were not previously possible with web-based email access. Enhanced loading speed allows LuxSci's WebMail to work with the same functionality of traditional clients such as Outlook, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail, but with the advantage of complete portability. LuxSci's interface is also highly customizable; using drag and drop features and a clean tabbed look, users can quickly and easily set up WebMail to look just how they like.

LuxSci's WebMail interface gives you secure access to your email from any computer with Internet access, and unless you specify otherwise, this will always be over a secure connection (SSL). WebMail is fully supported in both Internet Explorer and Firefox and works well with Opera and Safari. We also have an Xpress portal, which is a lightweight version of WebMail, ideal for accessing email using the browser in your mobile phone or for extra security/privacy.

We provide you with online tools for creating, deleting, renaming, managing, and searching your email folders.

• Supports any number of folders
• Folders can contain messages and/or other folders
• Folders are accessible via WebMail and IMAP
• Remove Duplicates: Configure removal of duplicate messages in any folder based on message ID, subject, sender address, and size. Run the removal automatically on a nightly basis or manually at any time at the push of a button.
• Auto-deletion: Configure auto-deletion of "old" messages in any folder to: 1. reduce the folder size to some fixed maximum, 2. reduce the number of messages in the folder to some fixed maximum, or 3. eliminate all messages older than some specified number of days.
• Auto-Archival: Have your folder auto-archived; its messages can be moved to a new dated subfolder, when certain conditions are met. Archival can occur daily, weekly, monthly, every 2, 3, 4, or 6 months, yearly, or when the folder grows beyond a certain specified storage size or number of messages.
• Offline Storage: Download your email folders as ZIP-compressed archive in UNIX- or EML-format for offline storage.
• Create, rename, move, and delete folders and directories.
• Concurrent Access: Multiple users using different email clients can access the same email folders concurrently without issue. It is easy to share access to your email.

LuxSci's WebMail suite allows you to share selected email folders with other users so that they can have read-only or read-write access to the messages therein. With this feature, you can access your email and the email of selected other people all from a single unified interface. You can even drag and drop messages between shared folders.

• More on Shared Folders

Email tagging enables you to color code and label your email messages with multiple keywords of your choosing. This process helps you sort your messages into categories and to visually identify particular types of messages by color. Managing your email has never been so simple.

When multiple people are sharing the same email folders, tags enable you to categorize messages and/or assign them to people. LuxSci's tags are compatible with Mozilla Thunderbird and any other IMAP client that supports "IMAP Keywords" ... so you can see the tags via IMAP as well!

• More on Tags

An annotation is extra information (a note) associated with a particular email message. LuxSci's WebMail enables you to add notes to any email message (even messages in shared folders) such that those notes are visible the next time you or anyone else looks at that message in WebMail, IMAP, or POP.

Annotations can be text or HTML, and they include the date and time the annotation was made as well as who made it. You can annotate a message any number of times.

Annotation is particularly useful in shared folders. In this kind of set up, adding notes or details to a shared email will ensure that others will see your important extras upon reading.

• More on Annotation

WebMail signatures allow you to add personality to your email! In addition to adding a signature to the end of your messages, you can customize the name and address they appear to be from. This is perfect if you have many different email addresses [not all of which are hosted at LuxSci] and need to send email (from a single WebMail application) that appears to come from any one of them.

• Unique signature technology; similar to other services' "personalities".
• Support for unlimited signatures.
• Determine whom your email appears to be from (you specify the From address and name).
• Determine to whom replies to your email will be sent (you specify the Reply-to address).
• Specify the classical textual part (HTML also supported) of your signature that will be appended to the end of your messages.
• If you reply to an email, WebMail will try to match the recipient address of the email to one of your signatures so that you automatically use the right signature for the right email -- no mistakes.

Of course, use of signatures for sending email forged with addresses that you do not have permission to use is a violation of our Acceptable Use Policy.

LuxSci's WebMail interface fully supports sending and receiving email messages in any language or languages:

• View messages encoded in any language or languages
• Compose messages in any language or languages
• Configure default encodings to use when none are specified
• Support for encoded content in subject and sender name areas
• UTF-8 unicode is used throughout our site
• Our user interface is translated into many different languages

LuxSci WebMail works very will with many languages such as: English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, Hebrew, Portugese, and many more.

Additionally, WebMail allows you to configure you:

• Preferred time zone
• Preferred date and time format
• Week start day

Email auto-responders allow you to make pre-defined responses to email messages that you receive while you are away -- out of the office, on vacation, or otherwise unavailable.

• Automatically reply to incoming email messages
• Have different replies based on which of your email addresses or domains the message is addressed to.
• Sign the replies with your signatures.
• Specify the subject line and body or each reply.
• Activate and deactivate the auto-responders manually or set a scheduled time window for activation and de-activation
• Enable "nags" for letting you know your auto-responder is still enabled after a specified date.
• Use HTML-formatted or text-formatted auto-responses.
• Configurable time window during which senders will not get duplicate responses for multiple messages sent.

An email alias is not an actual user, but rather a rule that indicates who should receive the email addressed to the email alias' email address. Individual users can also configure email forwarding for their inbound email.

• Use Catch-all aliases to capture email to non-existent address at your domain
• Redirect email to any address at your domain to one or multiple real local or remote email address(es)
• Supports redirecting email to up to 25 different addresses at once. (More destination addresses are also possible with permission).
• Unlimited aliases; change them whenever you wish via our secure online tools.
• Domain Forwarding Catch All Aliases allow you to forward any address at one domain, "domain1.com", to the same user at a second domain, "domain2.com".
• The Alias Manager has powerful search features that allow easy management and reporting on 1000s of aliases across 100s of domains.
• Aliases can perform several different actions: forward email to one or more recipient addresses, send custom email bounce messages, and automatically delete all incoming email.

If you have other email accounts and you can access them via POP, then this tool allows you to download messages from these remote accounts to your LuxSci email folders.

• Store information for an unlimited number of remote POP email accounts
• Download mail from each account to an any email folder
• Have your email downloaded automatically every 20 minutes
• Have the messages downloaded and then forwarded to your LuxSci account so that the messages pass through all of your inbound email, anti-Spam, and anti-Virus filters, including Email Defense. The result is similar to having your email forwarded from your other accounts to your LuxSci account. This is a good solution when you remote account doesn't permit email forwarding but you want to download and filter its messages.
• Delete or leave the remote email on the remote server (when downloading manually; the automatic hourly downloaded always deletes downloaded messages from the server).
• Optionally preview messages before downloading: select what to download or delete
• Download email from one remote account at a time or from ALL remote accounts at once!
• Supports secure POP (SSL) connections to remote POP servers.
• Combined with "Signatures" this is the perfect way to manage multiple email accounts!
• Fully supports previewing email messages that contain text in any language.

WebMail is feature-rich. Some of the many features include:

• International Email Support: Send and receive secure email in any language or character encoding. Support for multiple character encodings in on message.
• Security: WebMail is fully integrated with our SecureLine end-to-end email encryption service.
• Full, robust HTML email composition supported in Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera v9.5+, and Safari v3+
• Full screen viewing mode
• Automatic checking of your INBOX for new email
• Plain Text and HTML Email Templates
• Send any number of attachments
• Forward messages as attachments or inline
• Spell checking
• Save/resume compositions using a Drafts folder
• Request and respond to read receipts
• Set and view importance-level and flags on messages
• View images and HTML attached to your messages inline.
• View / download attachments.
• View complete email message headers.
• View complete message source
• Download individual messages
• Sort messages by date, sender, subject, size, and more
• Address Books, personal and shared, are integrated with WebMail.
• Private labeling allows administrators to customize the look and feel of the user interface.
• A large number of personal preferences allow users to tweak WebMail to behave just the way they want it. Some of these include:
  • Six different selectable layouts of the folder tree, message list, and message display areas
  • Your choice of what happens to deleted messages -- remove or mark as deleted and/or save to a trash folder.
  • Customize your tool bars the message information displayed in your message lists
  • Customize if message previews are used and if HTML and image content is displayed automatically inline for you.
  • Many, many more -- get a Free Trial and see them all.

Configure global taglines or disclaimers in text or HTML that will appear at the end of all messages sent by your users.

• Applies to messages sent via WebMail or from email programs using SMTP.
• Configurable on a per-domain basis
• Taglines/disclaimers can be added as attachments or added inline with the message content.

Monitor the content of all messages sent from WebMail or from email programs using SMTP.

• Search for key words or key phrases
• Use regular expressions
• Searches all HTML and plain text message parts
• Can block messages and or send copies of matching messages to an auditor email address.

LuxSci supports a large number of popular email clients, both licensed and shareware. If you use a lesser known email client, we may be able to help you configure it so long as the program supports either IMAP or POP, and SMTP.

• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Microsoft Outlook
• Microsoft Outlook Express
• Window Mail
• Qualcomm Eudora
• Ximian Evolution
• Apple Mail
• Enourage
• KDE KMail
• The Bat
• Pine
• and more...

Blackberries, iPhones, iPod Touches, and Palm Treos are just a few of the mobile devices that most professionals can't live without. LuxSci supports all three of these phones, as well as any other phone or PDA that properly supports the IMAP, POP and SMTP protocols. If your phone doesn't provide support for these protocols but does have a mobile web browser, you have the option to access your email using LuxSci's Xpress portal.

• Xpress Portal details

Download your email via POP:

• Supports SSL- and TLS-encrypted connections, as well as insecure ones.
• Alternate ports for secure and insecure POP are provided.
• "UIDPlus" supported.
• Read More

Access all of your email folders remotely using IMAP:

• Supports SSL- and TLS-encrypted connections, as well as insecure ones.
• Alternate ports for secure and insecure IMAP are provided. This includes secure IMAP on port 443, a port open on almost all firewalls.
• IMAP v4r1 server
• IDLE supprted.
• Read More

LuxSci provides SMTP Relaying so that you can send email from email programs (sending email from WebMail is a given and doesn't require an "SMTP" service).

• Secure SMTP via TLS and SSL provided, along with insecure SMTP
• Alternate ports for secure and insecure SMTP provided. This includes use of port 80 for secure and insecure SMTP -- this port is open in most firewalls.
• All of our email servers support TLS and will talk securely with other servers whenever possible.
• Anonymous SMTP: Remove all information about your sending computer (its IP address) and email client when sending messages. Available over SSL and TLS as well for email security. Available to all clients who subscribe to SMTP services. More about Anonymous SMTP
• More about SMTP

Send and receive email messages up to 50Mb in total size.

View your and your users' IMAP, POP, SMTP, and WebMail login histories. Includes IP addresses, if the connections were secure, etc. Login histories kept for 30 days.

LuxSci's Email Defense solution is one of the best in the industry. It combines 3 redundant virus filters with a host of spam filters, including Cloudmark, that vote to determine the likelihood that a message is spam. Email Defense catches 98% or more of spam while identifying very few legitimate email messages as spam. Combined with easy domain-wide configuration and flexible policies, Email Defense is a powerful and featureful solution for both large organizations and individuals.

LuxSci also offers "Email Defense Only" accounts for those with their own email services who wish to add Email Defense filters to transparently clean their email of unwanted messages before delivery.

Read more:

• Email Defense

LuxSci's basic spam and virus filtering solution combines many powerful programs such as SpamAssassin and Clam AntiVirus to provide an effective but less expensive alternative to Email Defense. Also, unlike Email Defense, LuxSci's basic solution can be added on a per-user basis, rather than on a per-domain basis.

Read more:

• Basic Spam and Virus Filtering Services

Compare Email Defense and our Basic Solution feature-by-feature.

• Feature Comparison Chart

Available to all users in all hosted accounts. If you want even more control over your email, you can use our online tools to make arbitrary procmail-based email filters! This similar to the email filtering supported by Outlook, but easier, more powerful, and on the server.

• Create email filters and rules using a simple, web interface
• Specify multiple, complex conditions for each filter
• Perform actions such as:
  • Deliver message to a specified folder
  • Forward message to other email address(es)
  • Forward custom a notice that a message has a arrived to other email addresses
  • Delete message
  • Bounce message back to sender with a custom error
  • Mark messages as important
  • Add a user-defined headers to your message
  • Forward a message or notice to a mobile device / phone
  • Save a message content to a Documents or eJournal WebAide
• Procmail-based implementation
• Use regular expressions for searching
• Search for text using any character set encoding
• Automatically configure the order of application of your filters
• Fully integrated with basic Spam & virus filtering, Auto-Responders, and SecureLine

Premium Spam and Virus filtering is available as standalone service. You can take advantage of this service and still keep your email hosted with your current email provider.

• Premium Email Filtering details

Our Premium Email Archival with Storage-Only and Compliance Controls options is an excellent choice for organizations that need to meet strict compliancy codes or simply need permanent email storage. With this package, you can search through your archives immediately; updated in real-time, this method of archival catches emails that nightly backups often miss. Emails are stored on servers in three separate geographic locations, with weekly backups made to optical media, so losing email is not an issue.

Our Premium Email Archival is court-tested and has been certified as meeting federal compliance regulations, including GLBA and HIPAA compliance standards. With our email storage solution there is no guesswork or risk, only the assurance of a tried and true method.

Whether you want a permanent archival solution or need to meet compliancy laws, Premium Email Archival can fulfill your needs.

• Read more about Premium Email Archival.

Our Basic Email Archival solution comes standard with all LuxSci accounts, excluding those who use the "luxsci.net" domain. The features, which come at no additional cost, include additional backups of recent emails. This option is for those who would like to be able to store recent messages temporarily, but do not require the permanence of our Premium Email Archival.

• Read more about Basic Email Archival.

Compare the features of our two archival options with our side-by-side feature comparison chart.

• Comparison Chart

Premium Archival is available as stand alone service. You can take advantage of this service and still keep your email hosted with your current email provider.

• Premium Email Archival details

Using LuxSci's WebMail, you can share your email folders with the other users in your account. Within that folder, as well as in any other folder, you can also mark the messages with custom tags and annotations to aid in your collaborative efforts. Email folders also support concurrent access by multiple users.

• Email Collaboration

"WebAides" are LuxSci's Web-based collaboration tools which provide many of the functions of Microsoft Exchange such as: Calendars, Contacts, Tasks and other objects that can be created, managed, and shared through our Web interface.

All LuxSci users receive one sharable address book and calandar as part of their basic account. Advanced features, such as tasks, other kinds of web aides, our WebAideSynch plugin for Outlook, and fine-grained sharing controls require a "WebAide" license. These can be obtained a-la-cart for just the users who need them.

• See: WebAides: Collaboration Tools

Some of the features of WebAides include:

• Access Control: Specify exactly who has what level of access to each WebAide; share information or keep it private.
• Security: Encrypt your content using centrally managed PGP keys. This, combined with our secure web site, ensures the security and integrity of your data.
• Attachments: Include files and documents as attachments.
• Tags: Label your entries with tags for better organization. These are the same tags that are used with WebMail.
• Import/Export: Import/Export your data from/to various file formats.
• Privacy: In addition to access controls allowing you to specify exactly who can see your information, LuxSci has a very strict privacy policy - our technical support staff will not access your WebAide data without your prior consent.
• Auditing: Track exactly who created, viewed, and edited each entry - and when they performed these actions.

Shared address books allow you to create organization- or department-wide contact lists, and to share them as needed. Families can also create a consolidated address book of friends and relatives to share with each other. Account-wide and domain-wide shared address books are standard in all LuxSci accounts. Fine-grained sharing control and unlimited address books are available with a WebAide license.

• More About Address Books

Companies publish different calendars to keep track of different tasks and schedules. It may be as straightforward as the Accounting, Sales, and Shipping departments sharing their separate calendars with Corporate. Or, it could be as complex as a large corporation with multiple calendars in multiple departments all sharing with different people or groups of people and using different leveles of access for different groups. Account-wide and domain-wide shared calendars are standard in all LuxSci accounts. Fine-grained sharing control and unlimited address books are available with a WebAide license.

• More About Calendars

Task lists are an important part of collaboration. Whether working in a small group or a large organization there are always tasks that benefit from sharing. The WebAide Task tools can also set up reminder emails. One of the best features is the ability to attach files to tasks. Use and sharing of tasks requires a WebAide license.

• More About Tasks

Outlook is still the most widely used email client on the market. We have developed a plug-in, called WebAideSync, to synchronize your Outlook and LuxSci contacts, calendars and tasks.

• Works with Outlook 2002, 2003, XP, and 2007
• Requires a "WebAide" license

An important aspect of collaboration, beyond the coordinating of schedules and tasks, is the sharing of files. We provide two methods for sharing files. You can use our WebAide Documents file sharing tool or, if you also have web hosting with LuxSci, you can set up password protected web-based directories that can be accessed via an FTP-like program (which supports DAV). You can also mount these directories on your desktop as a network drive allowing it to be accessed as if they were located on your computer.

• About the Documents WebAide

eJournals: Useful as a journal/diary, discussion forum, annotated file storage or an internal bulletin/news blog.

Notes: Store your notes and documents that are associated with your note. Use formatting tags to add colors and styles to your notes. Share your notes with your group.

Passwords: Organize your passwords in this secure WebAide so that you can refer to them later. This is very helpful with passwords and usernames that you use less frequently.

Links: Create a list of important links that you can access from any computer.

User Groups: Create groups of users for organizing the permissions of users into categories based on project or department members.

• See: WebAides: Collaboration Tools
• eJournals
• Notes
• Passwords
• Links
• User Groups

• Test Before Going Live: Use our "temporary domain name" feature to view and test your web site before making it live or before switching from your old provider.
• Scripting Languages: Perl, Hardened PHP 5, Python
• FTP Access: Access your files 24/7 using FTP.
• SCP and SFTP Access: SCP and SFTP access available to all hosting accounts.
• Web-based FTP: Secure web-based alternative to FTP.
• WebDAV: Access-controlled shared files and calendars on your web site.
• Password-Protected Directories: Easy-to-use interface for password protecting web site directories. Create users and user groups; assign read-only and/or read-write access to any directory.
• Web Site Access Reports "Webalizer" reports for your web sites, updated daily.
• Secure web site to secure email form support. (more)
• Access to raw web site acces and error logs
• Secure web sites over SSL
• Server-side includes
• SuEXEC for CGI scripts
• Custom Error Documents
• Full .htaccess support
• CGI scripts in any directory
• Real cgi-bin directory
• Mirror websites across multiple domain names
• Configurable web site redirection

• MySQL Databases: Use any number of MySQL v5.X databases with your web sites.
• Security: Supports remote access and TLS connections for security.

LuxSci allows you to have any number of web sites and domains associated with your account. All share the same overall disk and bandwidth quotas so that you don't waste money on extra disk and bandwidth for each separate domain. For web hosting customers, web site access statistics are calculated separately for each domain.

The least expensive way to setup multiple web sites is to use a "virtual directory". Instead of purchasing multiple domain names for separate users, you use your domain name, domain.com, together with a "site name" of your choosing. For example, your web site address could be "http://domain.com/site-name". You can have multiple web sites as virtual directories; see multiple web site hosting. This method is least expensive because you don't have to purchase multiple domain names and you don't have to pay for DNS services for them.

If you do have your own domain name, you can take advantage of virtual directory web hosting to give out separate web sites in your domain to your individual users. They will have full control over the contents of your web site within their virtual directory.

Using an SSL certificate, you can create a secure connection between your website and its visitors. This allows you to securely collect information from the visitors to your site or to display secure information to them.

If you would like to have a web site secured via SSL, you must obtain a secure site certificate from a trusted third party and a unique IP address from us for your domain. We can help you obtain the secure site certificate from our partner, Thawte.com.

If you wish to provide your own secure certificate, LuxSci will provide you with a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) and you can purchase or generate the certificate and give it to us and we will install it on our web servers. Note that in this case, you are completely responsible for obtaining and renewing your certificate.

If you wish LuxSci to provide your secure certificate for you, you will pay us and we will coordinate with Thawte.com to purchase and renew your certificates. All you will have to do is, perhaps, verify your identity and ownership of your domain with Thawte. This method involves the least work for you and ensures that your certificate will never expire without your permission.

If you have us order the certificate for you from Thawte, we will order an "SSL123" certificate from them; this is very fast and easy to obtain (1 day). This certificate includes: 128-bit capable encryption, domain check and validation, and highest-in-industry browser compatibility.

LuxSci allows you to (optionally) have separate web site locations for the secure and insecure versions of your web site for maximum flexibility.

We can manage the DNS for any domain, and if it ends in .com., .net., .org., .biz. .info., or .uk it can be transferred to us for registrar services as well. If you only use LuxSci for email, you can retain your current DNS management and still use that domain for your email hosted at LuxSci.

• DNS Details

You can register any available domain through LuxSci that ends in ".com", ".net", ".org", ".biz", or ".info".

• Registration Details

DNS Plus is our premium DNS management option that also includes the ability to redirect even your root domain name to another website. You can also choose to use the stealth redirect option to preserve your domain name in the web address.

This service is especially useful if you need to redirect many different subdomains to different web site locations.

LuxSci provides an intuitive and centralized administrative control panel allowing you to manage your users, domains, websites, databases, billing, upgrades, private labeling, advanced administrative features, and more.

The control panel is accessible to administrators using the same login and portal that they would use for regular WebMail, help, and support access. The user interface is unified and moderated by tight access controls.

LuxSci's access control settings allow you to grant management of specific domain(s) and their users to specific users. This allows you to (a) delegate administration, (b) control who can administer what parts of your account if you have multiple domains, and (c) preserve the private labeling of your interface with respect to management by sub-administrators.

Some of the many controls that you have as an account administrator include:

• Login Control: Control the minimum strength of your users' passwords, the maximum length of their WebMail sessions, and even force them to login securely to WebMail and Email services.
• User Management: View and edit all aspects of your users' settings: reset passwords, view reports, configure their email settings, configure their preferences, configure their contact information, and more.
• Custom Contact Fields: Add custom fields to your users' contact information for tracking internal details.
• User Auto-Delete/Auto-Disable: You can optionally have selected users automatically deleted or disabled if the users do not login (to POP, IMAP, SMTP, or WebMail) during a specified period of time that you can configure.
• Email Tags: Create sets of email tags on a global and/or per-domain basis.
• Email Capturing: Send copies of all inbound and/or outbound email for users in any domain in your account to specified auditor or archival email addresses of your choice. Users can be exempted from this process.
• Email Monitoring: Monitor the content of all outbound email for specific content (using text or regular expressions). Matching messages can be denied, sent to an auditor, or automaticlly encrypted using SecureLine.
• Taglines and Disclaimers: Add custom taglines or disclaimers to all outbound email messages for a domain.
• Aliases: Configure individual address and catch-all email aliases for any of your domains. Forward email, bounce email with custom messages, or delete email to these addresses.
• User Disk Quotas: Impose optional per-user hard disk quotas to control user disk usage.

As an account administrator, you have additional tools at hand to help promote collaboration among your users. You can subscribe users by default to shared folders with read-only or read-write access. These are especially helpful for sales, support, or other departments. As an administrator you can also define domain-wide or account-wide tags for messages. These allow easy organization for everyone's mailbox.

Administrators will find that WebAides also provide them with the tools to encourage collaboration within their accounts. Though shared calendars, address books, and tasks, you can keep your users on the same page.

LuxSci's accouts and administrative interface are constructed to support the management of any number of users, domains, and web sites in a single account. Resellers find this very useful, as they can have one account with all of their clients in it and thus save money and simplify management.

Of course, accounts with large amounts of domains, users, disk space, etc., will want to consider our dedicated server or POD options.

You can perform bulk operations as an account administrator. Some of these include:

• Bulk user creation from web forms or CSV files
• Bulk user creation of email aliases from web forms or CSV files
• Bulk deletion of users
• Bulk deletion of email aliases.

  Other types of bulk operations can be performed using our API (application program interface).

If you are an administrator in charge of more than one LuxSci account, you can use our Global Administration feature to administer all your accounts from one login rather the having to log into each account separately.

Our API allows the administrator of an account to write programs or scripts to perform administrative tasks such as updating, creating, and querying users.

• More about our API

A Private Labeled WebMail interface, allows you to provide a completely customized look and feel to all of LuxSci's web-based applications: Login, WebMail, Account Management, Website Management, Content Management, Help, etc. You will also have a customized "Xpress" members' portal. Use your group's name, fonts, colors, logos, links, etc., to completely specify your users' experience. It will look like your organization has its own unique WebMail service.

• Your Domain: Users can login via your own private WebMail domain such as http://webmail.yourdomain.com.
• Security: You can choose if you want Secure WebMail (over SSL), Insecure WebMail (no SSL needed), or if you want to provide your users with the option of secure or insecure logins.
  
  You can share our secure domain name, https://luxsci.com, if you want security but do not want to purchase your own secure site certificate.
• Look and Feel: Complete look and feel customization of fonts, colors, font sizes, header, and footer HTML. Specify arbitrary colors and fonts, upload images, style sheets and JavaScript, use any page layout.
• Content Branding: dynamic substitution of your company name, domain name, technical support and administrative information, etc., everywhere, even in the online Help.
  
  Your HTML is dynamically parsed for special tags so you can personalize your pages to your members.
  
  Separate customization of your public login page and for your Xpress portal.
• Custom Menus: Design your own pop-up menus with our online menu editor.
• Custom Messages: Provide customized messages on your members' welcome and login pages. Use WebAides such as eJournals to manage and show news and notices to your users.
• Multiple Themes: Individual accounts can have multiple Private Labeled Themes and can restrict application of these themes on a per-domain basis. This keeps users in one set of domains domain from accessing or seeing any information about the Private Labeled Themes for users in another set of domains. This feature also allows you to have Private Labeled Themes which apply to only selected domains in your account, while other domains can remain without private labeling, if you so choose.
• Multi-Lingual: Provide pages that dynamically change language based on your users' preferences.
• Easy-to-use web-based customization tools with extensive online help and technical support.

Private Labeling gives you the option to use server names that contain your own domain name for the POP, IMAP, and SMTP servers that you enter into your email program like Outlook.

You can also use your own domain name for secure email services if you provide your own SSL certificate or order a new one from us.

Private support tickets make it possible (though optional) for the administrator of your account to be the recipient of all support tickets that your users make. The administrator is then aware of who needs help and can either respond to the users' request, change the users' settings, or post the question to LuxSci's support team if further assistance is needed.

Private tickets allow you to use our own ticketing system for your own internal support needs as well.

You add Private Labeling to any web or email hosting package at LuxSci. The cost is a flat fee for the license, independent of the number of users or domains that you have, even if you are to be a reseller. The additional cost is just $10.00/mo or $100.00/yr for your private labeling license. Just check the "Private Labeled WebMail Interface" box when signing up for an account, or contact LuxSci support if you would like to add it after you have signed up.

Note that if you wish to use your own secure site certificate so that LuxSci's URLs do not show up anywhere, there will be an additional cost for the purchase of an SSL certificate, if you do not already have one, and a dedicated IP address. Read more about secure web sites.

If you have a lot of email stored on your former email provider's servers, there are many ways for you to migrate this existing email to LuxSci. Standard things that you can do yourself include:

• IMAP: If your former provider supports IMAP, you can set up your LuxSci IMAP account in parallel to your old account in your email client (i.e. Outlook or Thunderbird) and drag and drop messages and folders between the accounts. This will always work, no matter what kind of system your former provider uses.
• POP: If your former provider supports only POP, you can migrate your INBOX email to LuxSci using our WebMail-based POP-downloading tool. This tool can connect to your old provider and copy all your INBOX email to your new LuxSci INBOX for you.

Migration "en Mass": When you have a lot of email, a lot of folders, and/or a lot of users and your old provider supports IMAP, LuxSci can connect to your old provider and automatically download all email from all folders for all users and save this email in their new LuxSci accounts. LuxSci can do this once before your transition, and once after your transition is complete to grab any new email on the old servers that may have arrived during the transition to LuxSci.

User by User: If you have a situations where you need to migrate users separtely or in groups such that some users will be using your old system while some users will be using LuxSci; we have a solution. We can set up a special migration domain for you on LuxSci to which you can forward email from your old system for the users who have been migrated. This email will then be delivered to their new mailboxes on Luxsci where they can effectively send and receive email using their real address (the inbound email will merely pass through your old servers on its way to them). When all users are migrated, you simply change your DNS, remove the migration domain, and you are done.

Special Situations: If you are migrating from Lotus Notes, Exchange without IMAP, or some other proprietary system, LuxSci can use special software to facilitate the migration of all your email data to LuxSci. There may be an additional cost involved in these special situations.

Luxsci's bulk user and alias creation tools allow you to use a CSV (comma separated values) file to quickly add all of your users and aliases to your account.

Users: Users can be created easily in bulk using either a multi-user creation form or by uploading a comma-delimited or tab-delimited file of users into our administrative interface.

Aliases: Aliases can be created easily in bulk using either a multi-alias creation form or by uploading a comma-delimited or tab-delimited file of aliases into our administrative interface.

Domains: If you have many domains, LuxSci can add them for you automatically using its API.

Calendars, Tasks, and Contacts: LuxSci's WebAides support these items and you can import your data to the WebAides using CSV files on a per-user basis. Alternately, if you use Outlook, you can use LuxSci's proprietary "WebAideSynch" plugin to copy all of these data from your Outlook into your LuxSci accounts and then keep it synchronized thereafter.

If keeping the transition time to a minimum or having control over exactly when the transition occurs is important to you, LuxSci's technicians can help you with a plan to achieve your goals.

Ideally, it is possible for the transition to happen in as little as 15-20 minutes on a date and time of your choosing. However, this requires some preparation that we can assist you in planning.

If you have any questions about any of these migration and transition options, or if you would like us to assist you in any of these areas, please contact us.

Just about every hosting provider says they offer support for their services, but rarely does it amount to more than a glorified waiting list. They may tout a long list of features, but all the features and robustness in the world are meaningless without a professional level of service and support to back it all up and make it work.

At LuxSci we believe that it's just as important to work with you as it is for you. That's why, in addition to our ever-growing list of exciting features, you'll receive rapid, knowledgeable responses to all of your support issues -- from sudden emergencies to even your slightest concerns. No matter when the question arises, LuxSci Support is always easily accessible day and night, every day of the year. We're willing to bet it's the closest thing to a house call you'll find from an email provider. But don't take our word for it... see our customer testimonials.

Our primary support tool is our support ticketing system. We designed it to be intuitive and easy to use, and it is tightly intergrated with our extensive help system. All support tickets are immediately sent to our support staff when submitted.

Our standard support hours are 9am to 11pm Eastern Time (USA). We also provide emergency support 24 hours a day, every day, to quickly address all service availability issues.

LuxSci has developed an extensive collection of help documentation, covering every aspect of our services. It is logically organized and has a powerful search engine designed to provide an intelligent list of help files in response to your query. Additionally, our help files are dynamically tailored to the user that you are logged in as. From user specific settings, to set up an email program, to hiding documentation that doesn't apply to a user, our Members' Help is designed to eliminate wasted time sifting through information that doesn't apply to the question at hand.

If you prefer to talk to a support technician rather the use the support ticketing system, you can call our 800 number or open a support ticket with a number where we can reach you.

We can provide you with a consultant to guide you through the initial setup and/or on-going maintenance processes. This may be ideal if you have a complex and changing account and you do not want to be bothered with administering it yourself.

LuxSci offers a 1-hour, web-based administrative and basic support training classes for a fee, ideal for the Main Administrator or Technical Contact of your account.

Our infrastructure is designed and configured with many layers of redundancy and a highly custom architecture to prevent any interruption to your ability to access your email from anywhere at any time.

• High Speed Internet: A multi-homed network with DS3 to OC12 connections through AT&T, Qwest, Sprint, Time Warner, UUNET, and WilTel provides fast, reliable connectivity.
• Conditioned Power: Redundant N+1 UPS power supplies and an on-site diesel generator that can run indefinitely.
• Technology: We use: RedHat Enterprise Linux, Apache, MySQL, sendmail, UW IMAP (mix folders), Procmail, and PGP. WebMail and Infrastructure software are developed by LuxSci.
• Redundant Disk Subsystems: We use redundant disk subsystems (Hot Swappable SCSI RAID 5) to protect your data against the possibility of disk failure. In the case of disk hardware failure, your servers will keep running as usual and we can replace the affected disks with zero downtime and zero data loss.
• LuxSci uses multiple levels of email servers to protect you from mass-emailing viruses and worms and to off-load the effort of spam, virus, and custom email filtering.
• All of our shared servers use SCSI RAID-5 disk subsystems and redundant power supplies to protect your critical data against potential hardware issues.

Our Service Level Agreement is our commitment to reliability put in writing.

• Shared Environment SLA
• Dedicated Environment SLA

LuxSci guarantees as 99.99% or better system uptime for all shared hosting accounts. The SLA for dedicated servers is even better.

To insure the integrity of your web and email data, we perform nightly backups of all your data to machines in the same data center as your servers. Furthermore, we perform archived weekly backups of all your data to machines located in a geographically distant off-site location. These archives are kept for one month.

Your account can have data restored from backup once per month at no additional cost. Unused restores accumulate from month to month as credits towards your future restore needs. If you require data to be restored from backup more times that you have restore credits, there will be a fee of $25.00 per additional restore (or more depending on the complexity or amount of recovery necessary).

If you require a customized backup schedule, or that archives of your data be kept for a longer period of time, contact sales for a custom quotation. Customization of the backup and restore policies are available to accounts with dedicated servers.

LuxSci employes extensive server monitoring to ensure the health and reliability of all shared and dedicated servers. This includes:

• Constant remote monitoring of all service ports on all servers to detect service or connectivity issues.
• A custom server health monitoring suite runs on every machine and constantly scans for a vast array of different kinds of problems -- configuration, abuse, etc. -- and either mitigates the problems itself or alerts support so that steps can be taken to ensure that the problem has minimal or no impact on our users.

While any email server at any provider can be blacklisted easily and without notice, LuxSci's acceptable use policy and monitoring make the blacklisting of LuxSci's email servers a rare event. In the event that a server does get blacklisted, LuxSci has the ability to quickly (within minutes of identifying the issue) re-route email from the affected server around the blocks so that email can be delivered while LuxSci works with the company managing the black list to remove our servers.