January 2007 marks the tenth anniversary of SoftCom.

The world has changed a great deal since we started. The Dot-com bubble saw the founding (and in many cases, dramatic failure) of numerous new Internet-based companies. The political and economic situation has been marked by increased globalization and the aftermath of the events of September 11th 2001.

Looking back to 1997 according to wikipedia.org:

• Bill Clinton was starting his second term as US President.
• The Green Bay Packers won Super Bowl XXXI defeating the New England Patriots, 35-21.
• Tony Blair becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom ending 18 years of conservative rule.
• The first book in the award winning Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling is published.
• On January 12, the computer HAL 9000 comes online (in 2001: A Space Odyssey)
• Microsoft buys a $150 million shares of financially troubled Apple Computer.
• The domain Google.com was registered

SoftCom has also seen some changes over the years.

• In May 1997 mail2web.com was launched.
• In June of the same year we offered Microsoft Windows web hosting services.
• In 2001 we added support for 16 international languages to mail2web.com.
• 2002 saw myhosting.com become the world’s largest Microsoft exclusive hosting company.
• Later that same year mail2web.com got involved in car racing sponsorship with the Porsche Team at the Le Mans 24 and as the title sponsor of the Mosport – mail2web.com Grand Prix.
• In 2003 we took two large steps forward by upgrading to Microsoft Server 2003 and moving to a telco-grade Data Center.
• The following Year we introduced a unique web hosting package; a blended Windows and Linux offering.
• 2005 was the year of communication and collaboration, seeing the launch of both Exchange email and SharePoint hosted services under mail2web.com.
• Early in 2006 we took web based email to the next level when we launched mail2web.com LIVE. A free email service based on Microsoft Exchange.

Today SoftCom provides valuable, efficient and cost-effective Internet based services to more than 16 million customers with support of 26 languages in 220 countries worldwide.

I can’t wait to see where we will take things in the next ten years!

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ 100 Comments

Blogging is certainly a publishing revolution. Anyone with a PC and an opinion can now make their views and photos available to the world. And get feedback . . .

And yes, some blogs and opinions are downright boring. I’m sure I’ll get feedback to that effect. But some are great, niche sites that offer the highly focused information you can’t get anywhere else.

Further to my last post, I love gadgets. Check out gadgetmaniac.mail2web.com (based on WordPress) and you’ll find a massive collection of product reviews and articles about some products and developments I didn’t know existed, I will probably never buy but I find incredibly interesting just the same.

Some blogs can actually generate money through advertising. Don’t quit your day job, I’m not talking about ‘get rich, working from home’ schemes but rather the ability to generate enough money to cover your hosting costs and maybe a little left over for the odd gadget purchase.

Free sites have all sorts of limitations - file sizes, forgettable domain names, bad reporting and ultimately little control when it comes to integrating things like Google Adsense - the easiest way to run ads and make money.

But for less than $5.00 a month you can get a WordPress account with myhosting.com. WordPress is the leading application for blogging, can be set up in minutes (we have an auto-install script), and you can use the domain name of your choice (could be an extra fee if it’s a new domain name, but you can transfer an existing domain name for free).

Part of the setup includes an automatic installation of the Adsense plugin, so once you get an Adsense account it’s easy to place ads around your content. Write a few articles a week - check your traffic through Google Analytics (also included as an auto install provided you have an account) - and provided what you write is interesting and somewhat targeted, your opinion will be heard and you might even make some money.

That’s revolutionary.

John Carthy
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.
V.P. of Sales and Marketing

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ No Comments

In my last post I discussed a number of the steps we take to try and keep spam out of your mailbox. I just wanted to take this opportunity to further expand upon the use of RBL lists. The idea behind RBL lists is to compile a list of mail servers which fall into one of the following categories:

1. Open for relay - meaning they are easily hijacked by spammers.
2. Disreputable ISPs that allow spammers to use their email servers.
3. ISPs that do not actively respond to spam complaints against their servers by disciplining or shutting down users who spam.

By listing these email servers in RBL lists and actively using these RBL lists to block unwanted mail, we’re all doing our part to encourage bad ISPs to clean up, and to encourage consumers to use secure and reputable email hosting services and ISPs.

Although we feel we’re fighting the good fight, sometimes innocent users end up getting caught in the crossfire. Some users may not agree with the use of RBL lists, or may be unwilling to change hosting providers. So this is our motivation for providing the new Whitelist feature which allows you to decide whether you want to allow mail from select servers that appear in the “Blacklist”. This allows you to enter the IP Address of the sender’s server into your domain-level Whitelist, which will circumvent the RBL for that domain. We even make it easy for the sender and the recipient by providing them with a method to easily request and approve the Whitelist entry.

We feel that these steps give you the best of both worlds, protecting you from the bulk of annoying and unwanted email, while still allowing the email you want to receive to come through. I hope this helps shed some light on the subject.

Happy Holidays,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

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

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.

1. 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.
2. 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

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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

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?

• Cash payout for qualified sales
• Marketing support (links, banners and product info)
• Free to join

What do we get out of it?

• Valuable advertising investment
• New customers recommended by you
• The opportunity to reward you for your loyalty

Sound interesting? If you want more information go to http://softcom.biz/Affiliate/ and check it out.

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ No Comments