With our launch of Exchange 2007 come a few changes relating to SPAM filtering. Unfortunately, Microsoft launched Exchange 2007 with changes to the way that Exchange accounts are activated and the way that rules are created. As a result we’re no longer able to automatically insert our adjustable SPAM Filtering rule for Business Exchange 2007 users. However, we’re expecting that some of the changes and updates with Exchange 2007 SP1 will allow us to reintroduce this feature.
 
But just because we can’t automatically insert the rule for you, doesn’t mean we aren’t doing anything. All incoming email is still scored against our Anti-Spam system, and assigned a SPAM score from 0 to 10. The score that the email receives is inserted in the header of the email, and you can create a rule in Outlook or in any Email Client to take advantage of this. For example, you can create a rule which filters email with a score of 5 or higher by searching for the following header text:

X-Spam-Level: *****

Then move those emails to your SPAM or Junk Mail folder. Notice the 5 asterisks, which correspond to a score of 5 or higher. If you find that the rule is filtering too much non-SPAM, you can reduce the number of asterisks in the rule. If you find it isn’t filtering enough SPAM, you can increase the number of asterisks.
 
Further, both Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 include Junk Mail filtering options. In Outlook 2007 these options are available from the Tools menu by selecting Options, choosing the Preferences tab and clicking on the Junk E-mail button. As you’ll see, you have the option to choose 1 of 4 levels of junk email protection (either No Filtering, Low, High, or Safe Lists Only). You have the option of deleting suspected junk mail automatically, disabling links as well as adding warnings and postmarks. You can also create a Safe Senders list, a Safe Recipients List and a Block Senders list. You can even filter email based on the language it is encoded in, or the type of domain name it is sent from.

Using either or both of these options should help you keep your Inbox relatively free from SPAM. And we’ll continue to do our best to help keep you SPAM-free!

Thanks,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ No Comments

We recently announced the launch of Exchange 2007 that has led to some question about our email road map. So I want to lay things out for everyone.

• Currently all NEW customers signing up for Business Exchange Hosting will have their account provisioned on Exchange 2007.
• For existing Business Exchange Hosting customer, we are finalizing a migration strategy. We want to ensure that the transition to Exchange 2007 is completed with limited down time and with as little inconvenience to our customer as possible. We will be contacting customers directly with more details shortly.
• For customers with Personal Exchange and mail2web.com LIVE accounts the move to Exchange 2007 will take a little longer. Microsoft’s licensing model for Exchange 2007 including the ActiveSync component is different than the one for Exchange 2003. Additionally, HMC 4.0, Microsoft’s provisioning platform for Hosted Exchange 2007  has some technical limitations when it comes to our Personal and mail2web.com LIVE products. We are working our way through these administrative and technical details. Currently we are exploring the possibility for extending our offering of these products with Exchange 2007. In the meantime, we will continue to provide and support both under Exchange 2003.

I hope this answers some of the questions that are out there about our email solutions and Exchange 2007.
 

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ No Comments

Today we have launched Exchange 2007 for all new Business Exchange Email customers.

Exchange 2007 is the latest version of Microsoft Exchange, the industry’s leading solution for e-mail, calendaring, and unified messaging. mail2web.com Business Exchange provides built-in protection to help keep your e-mail system up and running and insulated from outside threats while allowing employees to work virtually anywhere, using clients such as Microsoft Office Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Web Access, and mobile devices.

One of the biggest improvements with the release of Exchange 2007 is the web interface. Outlook Web Access, (OWA) provides a rich, Outlook like experience in a browser.

New features in Outlook Web Access 2007 enable users to:

• Schedule Out of Office messages and send to internal and/or external recipients
• Use the Scheduling Assistant to efficiently book meetings
• Use WebReady Document Viewing to read attachments in HTML even if the application that created the document is not installed locally
• Access RSS subscriptions
• Search the Global Address List

Our Hosted Exchange model provides customers with competitive and predictable pricing as well as the security and features of more expensive in house email solutions. We offer even more flexibility with no minimum up front commitments, single seat pricing plans and 30 day free trial. This platform and model will allow us to remain as the leading email solution provider for Small and Medium Businesses word wide.

Existing Exchange 2003 customers with Business Professional Accounts will still be able to add and manage users on the 2003 platform. A migration plan is being finalized for business plan customers to move to Exchange 2007. More details will be announced shortly.

For more details about mail2web.com Business Exchange 2007 plans click here.

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ No Comments

About a week-and-a-half ago, we launched a new feature in both of our Control Panels.  Some customers may have already noticed and started taking advantage of this feature. This new feature allows you to view all of your past and current Customer Support cases. This includes all email correspondence, chat correspondence, and even telephone correspondence with our Customer Support department.

What is the advantage to you as a customer?

• You’ll always have access to all the Customer Support history linked with your account.  If you’ve forgotten what the solution to a given problem, go back at any time and have a look.
• If you’re away from your email but still want to check the status of a Support case, now you can.
• If for some reason you didn’t receive our reply email, you can view everything and even reply from your Control Panel.

We hope that you’ll find this feature useful, and if you haven’t already… try it out now!

• mail2web.com Control Panel
• myhosting.com Control Panel

Thanks,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ 1 Comment

We have made some changes to our Affiliate Program. Effective immediately the pay outs have been increased to 4 times the monthly fee for the plan. This is a great time to join the program or if you are already an affiliate to make even more money.

Here are the basics of the program:

• The program is free to join.
• We provide you with an online tools to manage your account and access the resources you need.
• Payouts are based on the schedule below. As a rough guideline they are approximately equal to four months fees for the service.
• After a referred customer signs up they must stay with that service for a minimum of 90 days and their account must be in good standing.
• Payments options are by check, PayPal or Account credit (for existing customers).
• The minimum payout will be $100.00 US.
• Payments are made once a month for qualified sales.

For all the details you can check out our website: http://softcom.biz/Affiliates/

Sign up for our Affiliate Program and start making money now!

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

**Exchange payout is per domain with at least one active professional seat

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

 Just a reminder that Daylight Saving Time in North America is coming to end one week later starting in 2007.

For more information you can read my blog post from last spring here.

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ 1 Comment

We get a lot of email from visitors to our site. It’s a mixture of questions, feedback, SPAM and sometimes the absurd. It’s Friday so I thought I’d share with you one that I found particularly entertaining:

Customer writes:

“How does mail2web actually make money?  I have a colleague who believes you make your money by harvesting passwords and then robbing people blind”

Maybe I’m ignorant but I’m not sure how to ‘rob people blind’ with just an email address and password. Can I walk into a bank, give them a email address and password and start making withdrawals?

I recognize that there are sites that harvest user names and password for online banking,  paypal,  ect. and somehow manage to exploit these accounts - though I’m not exactly sure how. I do know that ‘phishing‘ sites like this operate for a very short time and then, as people start to complain, they quickly disappear.

We’ve been operating our email retrieval application for 10 years under the same domain. We do not harvest user names or passwords - we don’t even keep them. If you’re interested in what we do with personal information here’s a link to our privacy policy .

So if we are not ’robbing people blind’, how do we make money? That’s a fair question. mail2web.com is expensive to run and requires a large farm of servers to service the millions of people who use the service monthly.

We subsidize some of this cost with advertisements. I know they are annoying but necessary to help pay for the free service. Otherwise we hope that by running this reliable, secure and useful service you consider subscribing to some of our  paid services.

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

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ No Comments

This post assumes you know a little something about Windows SharePoint Services. If you’ve never heard about SharePoint but you have, at some point, had a need to set up a secure, password-protected site to store documents with version control, collaborate, back up files off site, run project management software, a knowledge base or a whole host of productivity applications, you should check it out (and then read this).

One of the things we do that’s unique is provide unlimited sub-directories with every SharePoint site we provision. What this means in SharePoint speak is that you can have unlimited number of sub-webs, each with it’s own function and potentially its own membership.

For example, say you signup for a SharePoint site under the domain http://team.mycompany.com. At that top level you can add users and assign permissions (Read, Contribute, Design or Full Control ) and provide those users access to documents at that level.

But then you can add a Wiki (as an admin, go to Site Actions > Create > Sites and Workspaces ) as a sub-web. This would now appear as http://team.mycompany.com/wiki . This sub-site can be part of the navigation or not - your choice. And this sub site can inherit the same users and permission - with a single click - or have an entirely unique set of users and permissions.  

Another really cool feature - sub-webs can be created in a different language. Keep in mind not all the languages offer application templates (click here for a list and description of application templates) but all 25+ languages supported include the built in templates like Wiki’s and Blogs.

Maybe you want to run a project that not everyone is involved in, this too could be quickly added and not even included in the navigation if you want to keep it private (eg. http://team.mycompany.com/projectx/ )

There are a couple obvious advantages to using sub-webs as I’ve described. First, it saves you money - you don’t have to buy multiple SharePoint accounts to accomplish what I’ve proposed. Second, it’s more practical. Employees or members of your organization aren’t likely to remember multiple SharePoint domains, but they are more likely to remember and use one SharePoint domain - particularly if it’s loaded with content.

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

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ No Comments

I often get asked what I think is the most cost effective way to get mobile data. Should I get a BlackBerry or an ActiveSync supported device? (e.g. Windows Mobile, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson – look here for a complete list of supported devices)

Unfortunately there is no easy answer.  What I think is the most cost-effective relates to a combination of the device I use, my personal usage and most importantly, the data plan I subscribe to.  Data plans (GPRS) vary widely from carrier to carrier.

A lot of carriers offer great deals for data but sometimes those deals are limited to a specific device. AT&T/Cingular data plans come as low $19.99 for use with a select number of SmartPhones but to use the Samsung Blackjack you need to pay $39.99.  T-mobile offers a plan for $29.99 but neither of these include voice plans. The average cost for voice (minimum plan) + data seems to be between $60 and $80 per month.

That is if you stay within the data limits. Virgin Mobile in Australia launched a great plan, offering 300MB of data transfer per month for $10. Go over that allowance and you pay a rate of $15 per MB or almost 500 times the original rate.

So just how much data do you need to use the Internet over your mobile device? I get approximately 100 emails a day, have a massive inbox which I search regularly, have a fairly full calendar and a number of tasks I sync regularly. Using an ActiveSync device I use about 17 MB of data per month.  But because I have a very low data transfer allowance through my carrier, I avoid surfing the web unless absolutely necessary.

I have often been told that BlackBerry is much more efficient in its use of data as it relates to transmitting email, calendar data, tasks and related PIM information (most data usage, less what you use when surfing the web).  But if my usage is typical or even high, blackberries efficiencies may be irrelevant as the true cost of mobility relates to web traffic.

The true cost of ownership for a BlackBerry is really difficult to pin down:
- Are you on a personal plan or a business plan with a minimum user commitment?
- What is your contract duration?
- How much data do you want?
- How many voice minutes do you want?
- How many text messages do you need?

Almost all the carriers provide a complex pricing matrix for you to work with.  An informal poll suggests a range of $100 to $150 per month in North America and even higher in other parts of the world. Vodafone.co.uk will take you through a fairly complex wizard before letting you know you may need a 2nd mortgage to get a BlackBerry.

That said, there are a number of other reasons – outside of cost – why someone might prefer a BlackBerry or an ActiveSync-supported device. If the choice of the best device was an easy question to answer there would be a clear market leader, and that just isn’t the case. 

Only personal experience will tell which is right for you.  The good news is, with our Microsoft Exchange service you can use either technology.  ActiveSync is included free with our Exchange service and BlackBerry service is only $9.95 per month - a small price to pay once you’ve made the initial investment  into a mobile device. 

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

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ 1 Comment

I was at HostingCon in Chicago last week and I heard someone comment about whether “email was still the killer app.”

Besides being a slightly useless thing to say, it occurred to me that email never was a killer app. A text message is a message.  Rather it’s the tools used to manage messaging in combination with the protocol that makes for the better experience.

Truth is a lot of people I speak to don’t understand the difference between POP3 email, IMAP4 email and MAPI services. As a result, they don’t understand why Microsoft Exchange is so expensive (Microsoft Exchange email is based on MAPI) and so useful.

Let’s start with POP3. That’s the basic email that comes with most hosting plans or is provided by your ISP or cable company. The most important thing to understand about POP3 is that your messages are stored on the email server until you access them through a common POP3 client like Outlook, Outlook Express or Eudora. 

When you connect to your POP3 email account through one of these clients, all your unread email messages are downloaded to your local machine for you to read. They are removed from the server.

The one exception is checking your POP3 accounts through the mail2web.com email retrieval application (mail2web.com). This webmail application allows you to preview your messages, on almost any remote mail server , before they’ve been downloaded. 

We get a lot of complaints from mail2web.com users who think we’ve deleted their emails. What actually happened was someone opened Outlook on their desktop and downloaded all their messages off a POP3 server.  Now those messages reside in someone’s office / home PC and can’t be easily accessed.

IMAP4 is different in that email is stored on the server. There is an added bonus of being able to create folders to manage your messages. When you connect to an IMAP4 account, the messages are not downloaded to your local computer but instead are previewed for you, recording what has been read and what hasn’t and allowing you to move messages to folders you created. 

This is important as IMAP4 accounts give you the ability to access your email from multiple locations and computers and maintain a synchronized copy.

 All the email accounts provided with hosting plans on myhosting.com are both POP3 and IMAP4 compatible. Apple’s iPhone uses the IMAP4 protocol for email syncronization which you can use with our Exchange hosting plans or our myhosting.com email acccounts.

But the killer app is Microsoft Exchange based on the MAPI protocol.  Okay,  I hate the term ‘killer app’ . . . but it’s the best messaging platform on the market.  MAPI is an ‘aware’ protocol and by that I mean it is constantly listening for changes on the server and then communicates those changes to you, however you are connected (browser, desktop, mobile device). If you are running Outlook with a full Exchange account (our Professional account) you don’t have to constantly click send and receive to see if you have new messages. Changes are pushed as they are recorded on the server.

Like IMAP4, all messages are stored on the server but Exchange also stores your calendar, contact, journal, tasks and much more. All this data is ‘aware’ of changes and communicates those changes immediately. You can also share real-time data with others in your organization and collaborate in a way you could never do with POP3 or IMAP.

Of course all this enhanced functionality requires extensive hardware to support. While diskspace costs have gone down considerable in the past 5 years, even the best SCSI drives have a maximum rate at which they can read or write data.

Exchange hits this maximum quickly with very few active users. And that’s just one of the reasons why Microsoft Exchange is so much more expensive than POP3. Microsoft’s monthly license fees - charged directly to Exchange hosters - also adds to our costs.

But it’s still much less than what your business pays for phone service and in my opinion, just as important and effective for running an efficient business.

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

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ 1 Comment