We’re excited to announce that the beta of the Mail Assure Private Portal feature is now available to all partners. Private Portal allows partners to extend protection of outgoing email out beyond the devices that they manage to the recipients of the messages. Private Portal is included at no additional cost with Mail Assure Protection, and is focused on being easy to use for partners, end users, and recipients. We’ll be continuing to make improvements to Private Portal during the beta period, and we’d love to hear any feedback about the feature.

Partners: configure policies and track mail

To use Private Portal, partners configure policies that define which messages should be directed to the Private Portal. You’ll find a new “Private Portal policies” item in the new “Private Portal” menu section, where you can create, edit, and remove policies.

Partners are also able to track messages that have been directed to the Private Portal. Log searches can filter by “Private Portal status” (which indicates if a message was directed to the Private Portal) and include this information as a column or group by this status.

Partners can also audit activity taken on individual messages in the Private Portal. An audit log entry is created when messages first arrive in Private Portal, when messages are viewed, replied to, and removed or expired.

End-users: work as normal

For end-users, Private Portal is extremely straightforward – they continue to use their normal email client in the normal way. There’s no need to install any additional software, or learn how to use a new app or add-in.

Recipients: the Private Portal webmail client

Recipients receive a notification that they have received a new Private Portal message – as usual, partners can adjust the template used for these messages. The notification message includes a link to view the message – if this is the first Private Portal message the recipient has received, they will be walked through creating an account, or if they have already used Private Portal they will be taken directly to the Portal (after logging in).

Known Issues

There are a small number of known issues that we are working on addressing, in addition to further enhancements. We’re getting these out as quickly as possible, but didn’t want to wait for them all to be solved before you could take a look at the beta, and they haven’t caused issues for our partners in the preview period. We’ll post here again as resolutions get deployed.

• Delays between the notification message arriving and message availability in Private Portal. This relates to the issue we’ve been having with status updates taking too long to show up in the message audit logs. We’re very close to deploying a fix here.
• Custom template selection. While you can create new templates, Private Portal will always use the default template at the moment.
• The “Private Portal logs” page in the main Mail Assure app is missing a filter, so simply shows all logs. The fix for this will be deployed on the 10th of April.
• The template editor has the wrong help text in the sidebar, and wrongly shows technicians as well as admins (customers) in the assignment field.