Holiday Hours

Our hours will not be changing during the holiday season, we are open 24/7, 365 days a year. All cases will be handled under the usual SLA but do bear in mind that most of our partners and vendors are working limited hours. So while we are here for you, some external research and service requests may take longer to complete than usual.

Have a safe and happy holiday season.

New ExchangeDefender Service Provider Feature: Alias Domains

One of the very basic yet missing features from ExchangeDefender has been the ability to add an alias domain to the existing ExchangeDefender account. Truth is, we used to have this feature and had to pull it from the feature set because resellers kept adding new clients domain names to the single domain login. Since domain to IP (or hostname) mappings at ExchangeDefender are 1:1, this eventually breaks and huge privacy and litigation nightmare ensues. Imagine client upon client receiving each others email for example or bouncing it outright.

Fast forward a few years and now we have actual service providers that are experts at managing customer’s messaging environments. We decided to bring the feature back and bring it into the Service Provider feature set. Just select a domain name under the Management screen and select “Add Domain Alias” – type in the new domain name you are adding to this client and you are done.

P.S. As mentioned earlier on this blog, we have had to freeze development in order to deal with some internal affairs. We have resumed development on the 10th of November so you should see the usual improvements to Own Web Now products continue as we head towards new years. If you’ve got an idea or recommendation on how to make our services better we are always listening, either submit it through the product feedback link under the Development tab at support.ownwebnow.com or through anonymous feedback portal.

AhSay now compatible with ShadowProtect

We got some great news from our partner Kerry Riddle, reporting that ShadowProtect is now compatible with AhSay. As you may have noticed, ShadowProtect overwrites Microsoft Windows Volume Shadow Copy drivers and renders all other backup software on that server inoperable because they all use the default VSS driver. If you attempted to use AhSay on a ShadowProtect system you would receive an error when trying to use VSS backups: “String Index out of Range -1.”

We have updated our documentation to account for this update, hope it helps and you can now reenable Volume Shadow Copy on AhSay clients that have ShadowProtect installed.

Kerry provides the following:

OBM 5.4.2.1 fixes the problem. Tests ran without error.

Kerry

—–Original Message—–

OBM 5.2.2.5 / ShadowProtect Server 3.0.0.3 Compatability

Hi Kerry,

Sorry for the delay. The problems are resolved in the latest patches, which can be downloaded from http://download.ahsay.com/support/post-release-patch/obm.zip (for OBM), and http://download.ahsay.com/support/post-release-patch/acb.zip (for ACB) For upgrade instructions, please visit http://forum.ahsay.com/viewforum.php?f=1

Announcing OWN NOC Site

When stuff breaks (or when we intend to break stuff) you’ll hear about it first at our new NOC site:

http://www.ownwebnow.com/noc/

There are feeds, categories, upcoming graphs and charts and all sorts of helpful stuff that will help you work with us and stay on the same page. We had to publish this site ahead of schedule so there are many features that we will be introducing over the coming months but for the time being, OWN NOC is the best place to find out what’s going on. 

Understanding Outbound Delivery

One of the things we have been doing as a courtesy for quite some time is tracking outbound delivery problems. If you have an issue delivering to a particular recipient naturally the first step to look at is your message tracking center. But if you see the successful handoff to outbound.exchangedefender.com your line of visibility ends there. So you open up a support request and we look into it.

What happens 99% of the time is that the recipients server (or content protection network) uses a process called greylisting. While this is a great way to combat SPAM, it is a horrible practice to be used in business that depends on a timely delivery of email. Here is how the process works in the nutshell and the cons and pros.

Before accepting an email the server checks the IP address of the remote SMTP server and looks inside its trusted database. If the IP address is not in the database the message is temporarily defered (not accepted) for a configurable amount of time, generally 15 minutes. Properly designed SMTP servers will accept this error code and retry on a regular schedule until the message is accepted.

There are two benefits to this implementation: One, it establishes whether or not the remote server is a spambot or an SMTP server. Spambot will not try to deliver again because it is just slamming port 25 and dumping data. SMTP server will retry. Likewise, by not accepting mail right away it allows the message checksums to be reported to DCC (distributed checksum clearing houses, networks that track the identical messages seen over and over again) and it becomes more likely that the server will correct identify the message as SPAM if these are bulk messages. The lead time of 10–15 minutes makes that possible.

Pro: Less SPAM, local trust database, only accepting mail from legitimate SMTP servers.

Con: Long delays in mail delivery, if misconfigured, mail never gets to the target server.

ExchangeDefender does not implement greylisting nor do we intend to, but we are seeing a rise in the amount of hosts that are trying to combat SPAM using this mechanism. So if you are hearing complaints from users that seem to have a hard time reaching the specific recipient over and over, telnet to the remote port 25 and see if you get the 45x error code with a reques to try again later.

Hope this helps your troubleshooting, though, knock on wood, the rate of bugs and issues being tracked for ExchangeDefender has nearly disappeared.

OWN Discontinues Email Based Support

For the past eight months we have been testing our new support portal at https://support.ownwebnow.com and have had a lot of success in making sure support issues do not “fall off the table” as they tend to via email. Going forward, this will be the only way we will provide support, purchasing, cancellations and other account management.

Any mail sent to our previous support aliases will yield this automatic response:

*************************************
This is an automated message
*************************************

The address you sent an email to is not a monitored email address, your reply was destroyed.

Own Web Now Corp only provides support via our support portal at:
https://support.ownwebnow.com

If you have a support request or would like to update a support request please login to our support portal and create/update the support request directly. Doing so allows us to provide you with an SLA, guaranteed support request tracking, escalation and more.

Sincerely,
Own Web Now Corp Support Team
https://support.ownwebnow.com

Check out our blog:
http://www.ownwebnow.com/blog

There are several reasons we chose to eliminate the email support completely:

• We have no tracking of when/if a support request was emailed
• If the message is delayed because the support request was required to address a mail server issue we would get it far too late
• Clients would forget to provide updates
• Clients would keep the message thread going for support requests that were solved and were looking to address other issues
• E-mail is an insecure way of conducting e-commerce
• “Did you get my email?” <that they probably never sent>

There are far more reasons to drop email support but at the end of the day we needed a structured and fixed process of requesting support. At the moment there is only one way to get support, https://support.ownwebnow.com and we stand behind it with our SLA.

Thank you for doing business with us and I hope this change makes your support experience more enjoyable.

Global Operations Cycle Update

4:35 AM EST Update – Network shutdown proceeded as planned. The network recovery process is beginning. Please stand by as all the services are restored. Please be aware that we will not be able to work any Urgent or High priority cases while the maintenance cycle is active. We will resume regular SLA at noon EST. Please keep an eye on the blog as we update it throughout the morning.

10:51 AM EST Update – Powergrid maintenance complete, network maintenance complete, cage “shuffles” complete. Moving on to application layer testing.

1:21 AM EST, The day after update – All services, networks, systems and operations back to normal. We will provide additional details later, we’re also lobbying for a day off

DDoS In Effect 8/30/2007 6AM – 2PM EST

We are dealing with a fairly significant distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) at the moment and are doing all we can to mitigate the traffic. Please stand by.