Hello,

There’s a cool trick you can use to push almost any email account (POP3 or IMAP4) to a mobile device.

It’s not actually a trick but a few features we’ve put together into a 3-step process that will allow you to use a mail2web.com Personal Exchange account to handle almost any POP3 or IMAP4 account - like a gmail or yahoo email account.

By default, all our mail2web.com Exchange accounts are capable of pushing your mail2web.com email account using ActiveSync, RoadSync (good for Nokia, Motorola or Sony Ericsson users) or Blackberry.

But what if you want to push an existing email account you use to your mobile device?

All you need to do is sign up for a Personal Exchange account. You’ll get an email address under mail2web.com (eg. your_user_name@mail2web.com). Once you’ve signed up, go into the mail2web.com control panel and under ‘Manage Account’ you’ll see a link at the bottom page that says: “NEW FEATURE: use this account to handle another email address.”

This will take you through a 3-step process that doesn’t take more than 2 minutes to complete. The first step is to specify the alternate email address you want to use. We have a quick method to verify that you are the rightful owner of this email account.

The next step asks you to either forward your email to your new email account or use our email aggregator to automatically collect email from that account in regular intervals. Forwarding is a better option if your provider offers this but the email aggregator is easy to set up, free to use and works quite well.

The last step just verifies that you want to change your ‘From Address’ - the address your emails will appear to come from. Once you’ve completed these steps, all email from your original account is now directed to your mail2web.com account. Any email you send will appear to come from your original account but now you can access those through your mobile device as well as through the Outlook Web Access interface. You’ll also get the added bonus of the personal calendar, contacts and tasks that comes with our Personal Exchange account, all of which can be sync’d with your mobile device.

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

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ No Comments

What is Microsoft SQL?

“A comprehensive database and analysis solution, SQL Server delivers the performance, scalability, and reliability that demanding Web and enterprise line-of-business environments require. New Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) support simplify data access and interchange, while powerful analysis capabilities enhance data value. Enhanced availability features maximize uptime, advanced management functions automate routine tasks, and improved programming tools and services speed development.”-Microsoft/SQL Server Data sheet

So What?

Well that means that with a myhosting.com hosting account and MS SQL database plans you can build a dynamic, scalable website that is reliable and affordable.

To make things ever better we now have a FREE starter plan!
For more information or to signup click here.

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, myhosting.com ~ No Comments

When we started back in 1997 mail2web.com was the best way to access your email from any computer anywhere, any time. Now, ten years later we still offer millions of people a safe, secure and reliable way to quickly access their email. Now we have added a new Vista Sidebar Gadget and a Google Homepage Gadget to make it even easier to access your email.

You can check them out here.

If you want to download our gadgets they can also be found here Vista Sidebar and the Google homepage.

Enjoy!

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ No Comments

One of the first things I think about when starting a new website or blog is SEO. And although I’m not an expert, there are still a few things that I can do that should help my site…

Maybe I should start from the beginning. Some of you may be asking “What is SEO”? Simply put, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is the practice of improving your ranking on Search Engines and therefore increasing the overall traffic volume to your site. We live in a competitive society, and everyone wants to be #1 in Google, but you’d be surprised at the number of simple changes you can make to your site that will help you get there.

First you need to start by figuring out what keywords you want to be successful for. You want to be specific to your business or target audience. If you sell “blue widgets”, you don’t want to rank well for “yellow gizmos”. This is where Keyword Research comes in. Determine what keywords work for you, develop a list, then start building your content around it. You want to make sure you include these keywords in your content wherever possible - without overdoing it. The best policy is to use the keywords naturally on your site.

But, it’s more than just on-page content. Remember Meta Tags? Yep, they’re still here, and you should probably use them too. For starters, put your keywords into the ‘keyword’ attribute, and a natural sounding description that includes some of your keywords into the ‘description’ attribute. There are also some other things to think about, including sitemaps, the Title tags on each of your pages, and even the URLs themselves. Keywords count there too!

And this is just the tip of the iceberg, there are a ton of other things you can do. But it’s important to remember that none of it will ever matter if nobody ever links to your site. The big search engines give you “cred” based on the number of other sites that link to you, especially the sites that are more highly trusted. Now this doesn’t mean you should start a “links” page on your site or join one of those spammy link exchanges. If your content is good, people will link to it. You can also use some Link Building techniques to help get things started. Of course the best way to do this is to build links naturally. If you are doing anything fishy and the search engines find out, you’ll take a hit.

But you don’t have to do it alone. There are literally hundreds of SEO Tools out there that you can use. Even our own Tools including the Search Engine Power Pack include options for choosing keywords, generating titles and meta tags and improving raking.

But don’t take my word for it, get out there and give it a try.

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Posted in SoftCom, myhosting.com ~ 2 Comments

Greetings,

We get a lot of inquiries from prospective customers asking what the difference is between our Microsoft Exchange offering  and that of our competitors’.  A perfectly reasonable question given the fact that we are all selling the same core software, but how that software is packaged makes an enormous difference.

First, the obvious points:

• Price
• Provisioning - is your account created instantly?
• How much diskspace is provided - make sure to compare what is included + what is charged for additional space!
• What are the service levels like?
• What is the support like

I know we excel on all the above points but what’s often overlooked when looking for a hosted Exchange provider is the management interface. Essentially how easy is it to manage your account after you’ve paid and signed up?

Today, and over the next few weeks, I want to cover some of the things that we do that I feel are really unique in the market. Things that make our offering outstanding.

The first are some enhancements we’ve done to the OWA (Outlook Web Access) - the web-based option of Exchange for accessing your email, calendar, contacts and other personal information - that comes with all of our Exchange offerings.

Our customers can log into the OWA either by going to 

a. http://exchange.mail2web.com or
b. http://exchange.<yourdomainname>.ext ( an option for Business Exchange customers only).

Once you’ve logged in, you will see a stack of buttons on the left-hand navigation. We have added a button at the bottom of the stack, called “My Email Settings”. Click on this button and, while still within the OWA, you will now see a page that allows you to manage your account.

Rather than having to log into a separate control panel to access management functions, you can accomplish most tasks, like changing your password, display name or downloading your copy of Microsoft(r) Outlook(r), directly from the OWA with a single click.

mail2web.com Business Exchange customers even have the option of creating a unique OWA login page. The account administrator can even select from a variety of design templates, through the mail2web.com account control panel, to customize the OWA login page.

Check out mine: http://exchange.carthy.ca  

This is very handy if you are setting up an account for someone else and want to give them access to basic management features without exposing the mail2web.com brand (you may also want to customize the logo displayed in the upper, left-hand corner which can be quickly uploaded through the mail2web.com control panel).

We’ve made a ton of other improvements that we’ll continue to write about in the coming weeks.

And of course, if there is a particular feature you want to see, please leave a comment.

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

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ No Comments

Hello,

mail2web.com offers a lot of things but our flagship product is a gateway to check your email. By entering your email address and password we allow you to see the contents of your inbox, send, receive and delete messages as well as a host of other features. We don’t save your password or share your information with any third-party.

That’s obvious to many users but not all. Here are some common questions we get:

Q: I need to change my password.

A: We can’t if we don’t host your email. For example, if you are using a hotmail address, gmail or an address provided by your cable company, you must contact them to do administrative tasks like changing your password (or sign up with myhosting.com and we’d be happy to help:-).

Q: You deleted all my email. Please restore it immediately!

A: Well this isn’t exactly a question but we try and be polite when we respond. We don’t delete email. We can’t as we don’t have the password. Typically this happens when someone (or someone in the office / household) opens their desktop email client and ‘POPs’ their inbox. At this point all email is downloaded to the client computer. When logging into mail2web.com we display what is on the server and in this case it’s empty.

Solution: see if your provider can get you what is called an IMAP4 email account. We offer it at myhosting.com and it stores all email on the server so this would never happen.

Q: How do I view email messages that I have sent?

A: Unfortunately we can’t provide that functionality with mail2web.com. Again, we are only accessing your account for the time you log in, and have no ability to keep track of messages you have sent.

Solution: get a free account with mail2web.com LIVE. This is a feature rich, browser-based email account with calendars, tasks, contacts and more. And yes, it will keep track of your sent emails and even send email to a mobile device that supports ActiveSync.

When mail2web.com started our slogan was ‘It’s all about checking your email anywhere’ and to a large degree, that is still true. However, then ‘everywhere’ meant kiosks, internet cafe’s and anywhere you could access a web-browser (even through a PDA via http://mail2web.com/PDA).

Now, ‘Anywhere’ truly means anywhere your mobile device has access. And it’s not just email people want to access but all their PIM data (Personal Information Manager) like appointments, contacts, notes, journals, tasks.

To address the variety of mobile devices in the market we provide Blackberry, ActiveSync and even RoadSync options with our messaging solutions, but mail2web.com is constantly looking for new mobile technology to offer to our customers. If you are a vendor of a Mobile, ‘Push email’ technology, we’d love to hear from you.

And yes, that wasn’t 10 questions but I hope you got the point.

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

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ No Comments

Greetings,

In the past couple weeks, our customers on mail2web.com LIVE and mail2web.com Personal Exchange plans have experienced some service interruptions. I want to take the opportunity to discuss these problems and try to explain what we have done to remedy these issues.

From the initial onset of these issues, our Engineering team has been working closely with product engineers from Microsoft to analyze our environment. Following the analysis of the system data, we were able to identify specific issues in the Microsoft Exchange Product code that caused the service lapse. At the time of this post, these issues have been fixed and proper service has been resumed.

In addition, we have deployed additional Exchange server capacity and we have been migrating affected mailboxes in the off-hours. With these actions, we have further diversified our system resources on our Exchange platform to minimize the chance that these Exchange code bugs will reoccur.

mail2web.com Business Exchange customers were not affected by this issue so if you are experiencing any problem, please contact our support team and we will investigate your specific case.

I apologize for the inconvenience and want to assure you that we have taken every effort to provide our customers with highest quality of service. Again, if you would like to discuss about your specific case or provide us your valuable feedback on your personal experience of our service, please feel free to contact us through our support team (support@mail2web.com).

Thank you,
Kaan Bora Soran
Chief Operating Officer.

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com ~ No Comments

Now that I have your attention, I am excited to tell you about some changes we have made to our Affiliate Program. We have made it even easier for you to make money.

We launched the program a few months ago and it has been a great success with over 250 Affiliates already in the program. Now we have made the program even better with higher payouts, more payment options and a lower payout thresholds.

We have also made these changes retroactive to start of our Affiliate Program. So if you are already a member you will be able to take advantage of this right away.

We have tried to make this program as straightforward as possible. The idea is simple; you refer customers to our services and in exchange we send you 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 three 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 $50.00 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
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

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

Posted in SoftCom, mail2web.com, myhosting.com ~ 2 Comments

Hello,

Just a quick update to let customers on our Windows hosting plans know that we now provide support for ASP.NET AJAX.  Formerly known as ATLAS, this is a free framework for building rich, interactive, cross-browser web applications. This Microsoft technology integrates cross-browser client script libraries with the ASP.NET 2.0 framework.

This is mainly a development tool for advanced web designers and developers and will have no effect on our existing customer’s web sites. If you do want to use this technology, please make sure you have .NET 2.0 enabled on your account.

With all our Windows accounts we offer the option of running ASP.NET 1.1 or ASP.NET 2.0. By default your account will run ASP.NET 1.1 but you can update that instantly through your account control panel by going to Site Management > Site Settings > ASP.NET Version.

ASP.NET AJAX makes it possible to take advantage of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) techniques to create ASP.NET pages with rich user interfaces. ASP.NET AJAX allows for the creation of web applications in ASP.NET 2.0 which can update data on a web page without a complete reload of the page.

Check out these examples of what some people are doing with AJAX.

I still don’t know what Web 2.0 is. In a recent speech, Andrew Schroepfer from Tier 1 Research said it is the version after Web 1.0 and before Web 3.0. However, without having to assign some meaningless label to this phase of the web, I know this technology is introducing a whole new class of website development.

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

Posted in SoftCom, myhosting.com ~ No Comments

One of the key ingredients of a Shared Hosting account is the domain name. Without a domain name, it’s either difficult or even impossible for your visitors to reach your website. Which is why it’s so important to make sure your domain name is renewed every year at its expiration date.

There are a few different states a domain name passes through after it has expired. Of course, these rules don’t apply to all domain names, including most country-level domains, are operated by different registries with unique rules. However these guidelines generally apply for the big 5; .COM, .NET, .ORG, .INFO and .BIZ. Once your domain name expires, it enters a “Grace Period” where you have approximately 40 days to renew your domain name at the same renewal rate. On the 45th day after expiration, the domain name enters what is called the “Redemption Period”. During the redemption period it is still possible to renew your domain name, but the redemption fee is quite costly and does not even include the renewal fee. The redemption period lasts approximately 30 days, after which it’s no longer possible to renew. The domain will be deleted within 5 days from the end of the redemption period.

So you can see how it’s possible to go from a fully functioning domain name to a completely expired and deleted domain name in 80 days — less than 3 months. And the moment your domain name is deleted, there’s always the possibility that someone will snatch it up for their own use. Even if your domain name is only 1 day into expiration and you renew it, it can still take a day or two before its working again. This is why it’s so important to make sure your domain name is renewed before it expires, not to mention that you can avoid all the confusion and potentially complicated procedures to get your web site back on track.

There are a couple ways you can make sure you don’t miss the expiration date. Some people simply choose to renew their domain name for as long as possible in one shot, which is 10 years at a time. This way you don’t have to worry about it for quite a while. But that’s not all that helpful if you’re not sure how long you’ll need your domain name for, or if you simply can’t afford the 10 year renewal fee. This is where our auto-renewal feature comes in handy. For all domain names registered through myhosting.com and mail2web.com we will by default process an automatic renewal for your domain name 10 days prior to the expiration date. So all you have to do is make sure your account remains active and has up-to-date billing information, and we’ll take care of the rest. Of course, we also recommend keeping your contact information and email address up to date, since we do send renewal reminder emails regardless of whether you use the auto-renew feature or not. In addition, make a habit of logging into your control panel at myhosting.com or mail2web.com periodically to look for alerts and updates.

For those of you who have hosting services with myhosting.com or mail2web.com but don’t have your domain name registered with us, it’s not too late! If you want to make use of our renewal system or auto-renew feature, you can transfer your domain name by contacting our Customer Support Department for more information.

And a word of warning to all domain owners - there are some unscrupulous companies who try to take advantage of the domain name renewal and transfer process by sending unsolicited snail mail to domain name owners, trying to get them to renew their domain name at inflated prices. Beware of these unsolited mail campaigns. If you receive this kind of mail and the sender doesn’t look familiar to you, check with your domain name registrar first so you don’t fall into the trap!

Regards,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

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