2006 October - mail2web.com Blog

Microsoft Exchange: the power behind Microsoft Outlook

{ October 27th, 2006 }

A lot of talk lately about Microsoft Exchange. Some of it only makes sense to people who are intimate with the product. I’ve heard people say, “if you’re serious about your business you’ll get Exchange’. But what does that mean? Why do I need to get an Exchange server? What is an Exchange server?

In simple terms, Microsoft Exchange is the engine that powers Microsoft Outlook. A lot of people use Microsoft Outlook to manage a basic email account - a vanilla email account you might get for free, from your ISP or included with a hosting plan - technically referred to as POP3 or IMAP4.

These are not Exchange accounts and if this is what you use you are not getting the full messaging experience.

An Exchange powered Outlook account does much more. Our website can explain the individual benefits but if you want to share, collaborate, manage your time and messaging better, get it.

Email has become as important to businesses as a phone but if you don’t have a good email account, it won’t seem like a good communications tool.

A good communications tool is always in sync. If I accept a meeting request through my mobile device, it will appear in my calendar on my desktop. If I change the time of the meeting on my desktop it will be reflected when I use the web-based interface for Outlook. Email that doesn’t do that creates more work than it solves.

So it’s not just the desktop client you get with the complete Outlook solution. Sign up for an account and you get a copy of Outlook 2003, a web-based interface (OWA) that looks and behaves almost exactly the same and a light mobile interface (OMA) for when you’re on a weak connection. Use ActiveSync or enable the Blackberry service and you’re as efficient at your desk as you are on the golf course (and nobody needs to know).

If you agree Microsoft Exchange is one of the best messaging solutions in the market, the question remains, how do I get it? Some try to host it themselves, others now out-source.

If your business has a highly trained, 24/7 operations staff, 24/7 physical security, experienced Exchange administrators on staff, an amazing connection to the internet, fully-redundant hardware, sophisticated backup . . . and tons of money, then you should host it yourself.

Otherwise, the out-source model makes the most sense. Who you choose to out-source is another matter. Whoever you use, make sure they have all the above, have automatic provisioning (add / upgrade accounts only as you need them), and provide free upgrades to the lastest versions as they become available.

If you’re serious about your business you’ll focus on your business. You didn’t try to setup your own phone system - why try and manage the rest of your communications. And finally, if you’re serious about your business, don’t use a hotmail account. Use another Microsoft product - Exchange.

Sincerely,
John Carthy
V.P. Sales and Marketing
Softcom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ 6 Comments

Stopping Spam in its tracks

{ October 26th, 2006 }

We’ve become so accustomed to spam cluttering up our mailboxes, that it’s hard to remember that there was ever a time without it. In fact, the origins of spam go back so far that it is unlikely that any of us were fortunate enough to ever enjoy a spam-free mailbox.

We can draw a lot of similarities between postal mail and email. However unsolicited postal mail and unsolicited email have some significant differences. With unsolicited postal mail, the cost of delivery is entirely covered by the sender. This is not the case with spam email. Of course the spammers will pay for part of the delivery cost, but the majority of the delivery cost is paid by the recipients’ email service provider in bandwidth, CPU usage and storage space. These costs are often passed on to you, the end user via your subscription fees. So spam is not only annoying, but it is costly to all of us. By some estimates, spam accounts for up to 85% of all email.

Here at SoftCom, in order to try and reduce these costs, we use a number of different mechanisms to try and eliminate spam – even before it is delivered to our email servers. Currently, we use two important checks before accepting the email from the sending server.

We check against a number of reputable RBL lists, or Realtime Blackhole Lists. An RBL is basically a list of email servers or service providers whose customers are responsible for the SPAM or whose servers have been hijacked for SPAM relay. Any connections to our email server from a server on the lists we use will be rejected, and the email will not be accepted for delivery.
The second line of defense is to check the recipient email address against our list of users. Any email sent to a nonexistent user is rejected. This type of email can even be a result of an email dictionary attack, a technique often used by spammers to try and discover new email addresses to target with spam.

Surprisingly, these two types of connections to our mail server account for up to 92% of all attempted connections to our email servers. If we were to accept all of these connections that our email server capacity would need to be increased by as much as ten times just to be able to handle the volume. For a customer on our Basic hosting plan ($9.95/month), this could mean a price increase of up to $10, doubling the monthly fee. (But don’t worry, we don’t have plans to do anything as drastic as that!)

The remaining 8% of email that is accepted is then scored against our Anti-Spam system which uses a series of rules and checks to determine the likelihood that any given email is spam. Anti-Spam rules will result in an email being given points towards an overall score. In general, email with a score of 5 or greater is considered to be spam. About 42% of all accepted email scores a 5 or greater, and 58% scores under 5. This means that up to 95.4% of all email either attempted or accepted to myhosting.com email servers is spam or suspected spam.

In addition to all this, we perform Anti-Virus scans on all incoming email, as well as some Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus scans on outgoing email to ensure that our servers are a source of clean email.

But that isn’t all… there are some further steps you can take. Due to the way the Anti-Spam system works, you can choose from multiple options on how to handle the spam that arrives makes it to your inbox. You can choose to tag email scoring 5 or higher with SPAM in the subject, thus allowing you to create an email rule to sort or delete unwanted spam. You can choose to take no action at all. Or you could even make a custom rule which checks the email header for the Spam score, and filters your mail based on your own thresholds. This allows you to increase or decrease the sensitivity of the Anti-Spam setting on your own. For our mail2web.com Exchange customers, this can even be adjusted from the control panel.

And for those users who want to bypass the RBL checks, it is now possible for myhosting.com customers to whitelist servers that don’t pass our RBL checks, on a per account basis. And we’re planning to provide this feature for mail2web.com Exchange customers in the near future as well.

Although we do as much as possible to keep your inbox free of spam, nothing is perfect. Spammers are always trying new techniques to get past our filtering methods. And since the volume of email requires the use of an automated system, there are from time to time both false-positives and false-negatives. But we aren’t letting our guard down yet and we’ll continue to do whatever we can to keep your inbox Spam free.

Thanks,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ 6 Comments

Subscribing with RSS

{ October 18th, 2006 }

More and more, we’re seeing a shift in the way that people communicate on the internet. Here at SoftCom we’ve decided to make the leap and move from sending periodic email newsletters to more frequent blog posts. This allows us to get more detailed about any subject, and it allows you, the reader, to decide when and how you want to read that content. With many blogs comes a feature known as RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. And although it is becoming fairly common, we wanted to take some time to explain to you how you can use this to keep up to date with our blog.

From your BrowserSome browsers, such as Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox include features which allow you to add RSS feeds in your Favorites or Bookmarks. When you are on a website that has an RSS Feed, you’ll see an icon like this in your browser’s Address field or one of your Toolbars. This is usually an indication that you can add the Feed to your Favorites or Bookmarks. For IE7 users, clicking on this button will allow you to add the RSS Feed to your “Feeds” Favorite Folder which will then be accessible from your Favorites Center (Alt+C). For Firefox users, clicking on the icon will allow you to create a “Live Bookmark”, which you can place anywhere in your Bookmarks, including your Bookmarks Toolbar Folder.
Using a RSS Reader or News AggregatorThere are basically two different types of RSS Readers: the kind that you install on your computer, and the kind that you use from the web - and there are advantages to both. With a web-based RSS reader, you can read your subscriptions for any computer that is connected to the internet. With a software-based RSS reader, you can download your RSS Feed updates and read them when you’re offline. We have subscription buttons for some of the most popular online RSS Readers on the right-side of this blog, which include Bloglines, Google Reader and NewsGator. Some popular RSS Readers include FeedDemon, FeedReader and RssReader. There are literally hundreds out there for you to choose from.
Customizable Portal PagesThese types of services, like My MSN, My Yahoo and My AOL, allow you to add custom content on your page including RSS feeds. For your convenience, we’ve added buttons for the most popular portal pages on the left side of the page. These websites differ from RSS Readers in that they usually display more than just RSS Feeds, and any RSS Feeds you do add will be displayed inline with your other content.

We hope that you take this opportunity to explore our blog and subscribe to our RSS Feed, using whatever method you prefer most. We’ll do our best to keep this blog updated with the latest news and information that is both relevant to the services we offer, and to your needs.

Sincerely,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ 4 Comments

then they tell two friends…

{ October 6th, 2006 }

We humans are social creatures. We seek out the opinions of those we trust before we make important decisions. This is especially true when we are in the market for new products or services. I know I get asked all the time, “have you heard about this company” or “who would you recommend for that service”. That is why word of mouth advertising is still one of the most effective ways to introduce people to products.

I have always felt the best sales force is made up of satisfied customers. I also believe our products and services are of real value. It is for these reasons I was excited when our Affiliate Program was launched recently.

Our program gives you the opportunity to earn money by referring customers to our services. This is a real win-win program.

What do you get out of it?