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LuxSci released their new webmail client a while back, which makes more aggressive use of new technology to be faster and more like a desktop application. The biggest change is the mailbox view; they have implemented a 3-pane style view with a folder pane, a message list and a preview pane. It looks a lot better, and makes better use of space, though there are still a few minor nits.
You can choose various arrangements, and the panes can be dragged to resize. This works pretty well (it doesn't use old-style frames).
Text previews of unread mails are pre-downloaded (up to a certain size), so when you click on the messages the preview appears instantly. Mails you've read before are not available for preview by default, though you can change that option. Regardless, there is a link to click for the full message. Double clicking opens the full message in a new window.
This preview is quite nice on a fast connection but I wonder how managable it would be on a slow one. You would probably use the lightweight Xpress webmail in that case.
There seems to no longer be a one or two line preview within the message list available. I found that feature handy in Fastmail for scanning the mail quickly. However, the ability to quickly click through unread mails and see the preview is an OK substitute.
Other new features in the mailbox include hierachical view of folders, drag and drop to folders, multiple selection using shift or ctrl (a bit of a double-edged sword in some ways) instead of checkboxes, more keyboard shortcuts, and a multitude of small improvements. One example of thoroughness is that, when composing a mail, it checks the server before sending so you don't lose the mail if there is a problem.
Preferences have been updated to cover the new mailbox, and seem a bit slicker in general. You can customise toolbars now. In general there is a suitable profusion of options.
Searching reloads just the message list, not the whole page. The rest of the mail client, such as the welcome screen with integrated news, mailbox summary, calendar etc, and for reading and writing mails, seems to be about the same.
As a general note, LS have continued to issue smaller updates, news and tips. There is a strong impression of continuing activity.
The new LuxSci webmail seems to bring them up to a more competitive position and is slick enough to be a general pleasure to use. While still a little quirky in places it is no longer a let-down compared to the rest of their service.
For myself, the cost is still excessive for what I need, so I haven't used it a lot except to finish this review. I think that I would recommend it in general now, for those who want a provider prepared to put their money where their mouth is on reliability.
I am an individual, looking for a company offering reliable email. I'm prepared to pay, and pay quite a lot (compared to some other people), if the system is good. One of the systems I eventually heard about was LuxSci. This review will describe my experiences with them as an individual email user.
I use POP rather than IMAP. Webmail is not my priority, but I do use it regularly, and I have made an effort to survey it for those interested. The screenshots should give you a good idea of what LuxSci is like to use. I do not pretend to have used every feature of LuxSci's email services; some of them are only available with your own domain or more expensive accounts. In particular, I have not looked at the security features LuxSci offers.
For business, I've been using Fastmail for some time. Recent long downtimes convinced me they are not currently as reliable and mature as they first appeared, although the features are quite nice.
For personal email I use SpamCop mail, which is a basic mail system (IMP4/Horde) making no particular reliability claims, but with rather good spam handling, as you might expect. I use mail.com as an email forwarding service, which allows me to change my actual email provider easily.
I've looked at Tuffmail recently, but don't have much to say about that. Like SpamCop they use common open source web clients (SquirrelMail, IMP3, IMP4, and others) on top of their own infrastructure. The flavour of tuffmail is quite different to the others, with a strong technical and business management bent, and reliability is claimed to be very good but I can't speak to that yet.
LuxSci, or "Lux Scientiae" in full, is a company offering hosted email services for individuals and businesses. All accounts are paid, although a free trial is available. You can use your domain with them, if you want, or use their own domains (joe at luxsci.net).
LuxSci are serious about reliability, and charge accordingly. They offer a 99.99% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA), offering predefined financial compensation if they fail to achieve the target uptime. In return, their costs start at US$10 per month (US$120 per year). This immediately makes them more expensive than any other company offering individual email (as far as I know) - at least they are more expensive than FastMail, SpamCop and Tuffmail. But that's OK, if they deliver the goods.
The following features are standard with LuxSci email (probably not exhaustive):
LuxSci don't offer any of the following with their individual email accounts:
They have no plans to add any of these, to my knowledge.
LuxSci's own website is well-presented and usable, except for some rather unnecessary Flash animation on the home page. The webmail login page is fairly lightweight (something I came to value when using mobile connection; nothing like 100kB of graphics to load over 9600 before being able to get to your inbox :).
Setting up a trial account is a bit tiresome, as it has to be manually processed by LuxSci staff before you can use it, and requires reams of data assuming you are a business user. This probably prevents abuse, but is annoying.
After you've paid for an account, you're left a little in the dark as to what happens next; it says "Your transaction has been accepted" with nothing further on the web page. In fact, an email receipt arrives, and a further email will arrive once they have processed your order, which only happens between 9 am and 10 pm US time. Fine for US users, of course. Once accepted, you get login details.
Setup is quite nice, including a help page customised to your settings. Logins are straightforward. One slight inconvenience is that you are allocated a particular POP/SMTP servers, e.g. pop-8.luxsci.com. While this is fine once off, you're unlikely to remember it for next time, whereas other services are straightforward and often guessable.
LuxSci have their own unique webmail client which integrates email, a welcome screen, account management, calendars, address books, their support ticket system, and many other things. When you first log in you see the configurable welcome screen. Some parts refresh themselves after loading.
Important Note: After I grumbled about some aspects of the webmail, LuxSci support informed me they are working on a brand new webclient. So the current interface will at some point be replaced. This is unfortunate for my review, but does reflect the current offering.
At the top are dropdown menus for various functions. These menus and other parts of the system work pretty well. Clicking 'Email' leads you to your inbox.
This webmail client is quite functional, offering the majority of features users will need. I haven't detected any major lacks. And it has a fairly clean, easy to read appearance. They support various browsers (IE, Firefox, Netscape 7) and have tested other browsers (Opera, Safari, Konqueror).
But it is unfortunately very wasteful of screen space and inconsistent in it's presentation. For these screenshots my font size is larger than most people will use, but shrinking the font does not make much difference to the size of pages. In this respect it compares quite poorly to most other common webmail clients. This is probably why LuxSci are making a new one. Apart from the integration of their own additional systems, I didn't see much that LuxSci do which other clients don't.
Technologically, it is moderately advanced, using "AJAX" in various places; but in reality this doesn't seem to make much difference - it is not as radical as Gmail for example. The AJAX stuff seems to be a clip on for the most part - for example, preferences are saved using it instead of refreshing the page; HTML emails expand themselves after the basic mail view has opened. Shrug.
There are a fair number of options for how messages are displayed; you can configure preview lines, and whether compose and message view are in new windows or the same. Previews of message content can be turned on or off, but if on are always shown even for read mails.
Mail composition is again large and a bit cumbersome, and makes a usability blunder by having the send button only at the top. The composition screen is so tall it will be almost two screens in height for most people. There are however a lot of options, which depending on your needs could be quite handy. Clicking on the Subject or Message titles checks the spelling of those parts. Clicking on the To, CC or Bcc fields opens an address book browser; there doesn't seem to be any inline expansion of addresses on the fly.
In addition to their standard web client with pretty graphics and AJAX goodness, LuxSci have an "Xpress Portal" client that uses simplified HTML to work on older browsers and with less fanciness. This also slightly reduces the screen space usage. However, it basically has the same style and doesn't really work much differently in general.
The LuxSci address books seem very full featured - designed for those who want to manage lots of contacts. I haven't used them much.
There is a fair range of options to customise LuxSci mail to your personal preferences as to operation. Unfortunately you can't do much about the look or use of space. Some of the options are rather verbose, e.g. "Do you want to do XXXX" instead of just "XXX?". There is reasonable international support, though I doubt it will be enough for everyone in the world. In the regional options screen, you can also see the nifty inline context help, which is probably one of the better uses of Ajax here.
I have never noticed any significant slowdown in LuxSci's systems. POP, SMTP and Webmail have always been responsive for me (and therefore presumably IMAP in the background). Likewise I have noticed no downtime in two months. This is of course, not a very good test, but at least indicates they have no fundamental problems.
The "four nines" uptime (99.99%) was set in May 2006, up from 99.9% previously. So clearly they are confident about their systems and ability to deliver. More generally, LuxSci are considered very reliable in the email community, if you are prepared to pay the cost.
From several angles, LuxSci's spam and virus protection has issues.
Firstly, it is provided by a third party (Mx-Logic) and does not appear to be as reliable as LuxSci's own systems. This is probably to be expected, as spam and virus filtering is a very demanding task compared to basic email provision, requiring a lot of CPU and constant monitoring to cope with the accursed spammer's new tactics. Nevertheless, the end result is that the reliability of MX-Logic affects the service you are paying LuxSci for.
During my time, there was a period of 90 minutes where MX-Logic were down, and as a result incoming mail did not arrive (no mail was lost as far as I can tell). That's a small downtime (compared to, for instance, Fastmail's multiple-day downtimes) but that 90 minutes already lowers them below their target 99.99% uptime (if I have calculated correctly) for the month and indeed the year. It would seem that "four nines" uptime is quite ambitious.
Secondly, only basic spam+virus protection is available using LuxSci domain. The full spam and virus protection (called "Email Defense") is only available if you have your own domain. To an individual user that may be of no use - it isn't to me.
That leaves individuals without a domain using their "basic protection", and this frankly is poor. On the upside, I have had no false positives, but on the downside it has let through maybe 40% of spam. You will want some client side filtering if you are going to use LuxSci in this mode (I use Mozilla/Seamonkey which has built in Bayesian filtering).
With basic protection, you can choose thresholds for "definite" and "probable" spam; choose to send definite spam to a folder or delete it; tag subject lines; and there is a basic white list and blacklist, for email addresses or whole domains. You can indicate if you expect emails in certain non-English languages; but you can't choose particular blacklists, weightings etc. (See options, right)
Finally, even if you have your domain you will have to pay extra to use "Email Defense". On top of an already comparitively expensive service, this seems perhaps a little excessive. However, it is aimed at businesses rather than individuals.
This is an area where LuxSci really does well, and reflects the amount of money being paid.
There is quite thorough online help for every setting and option, available inline in the pages. In addition there is quite a lot of background and general information, helping those who are less familiar with email to understand things. The welcome page integrates news about the service, which is detailed and timely.
Support is very good: direct and to the point. You can open tickets (issues) right within the webclient, see the status and history of your issues, reopen them etc. I opened four issues about various questions and in each case they were answered within a few hours. In most cases less than one hour - and this is without marking them as urgent. The answers were clear, professional, and to the point.
Just in the few months I have been online I can see they have done several upgrades to the system, improving spam protection, integrating with SendYourFiles, a new Outlook synch upgrade, templates etc etc. It shows all the signs of being a well-planned and maintained system, aware of the world outside LuxSci without slavishly following every new trend.
The online downside seems to be lack of a user forum. THis is probably a conscious choice by LuxSci to provide professional business support instead. I do feel however, that they could use some user discussion to focus improvements in their web client.
Basically, LuxSci provide what they promise: solid, professional email with a range of services, and excellent support. But they have a fairly poor web client (which will be replaced sometime), and are not particularly featureful. For individual users the spam filtering is not great and better value can be found elsewhere.
For me, the spam and poor webclient put me off a little at the price, and I am looking around again; probably to give Tuffmail a turn. Or perhaps Fastmail will finally get their infrastructure right :).
