ExchangeDefender 5 UI Changes Webcast Available

Just a brief note to bring you up to date with the ExchangeDefender 5 launch and all the wonderful stuff that is coming with it. If you didn’t get a chance to join me during one of the three webcasts last week, don’t worry, you can download it now and watch it at your own pace:

Download ExchangeDefender 5 UI Webcast

Please watch the video in full screen, on my Windows 7 system it started with a black screen and I could not see the presentation without resizing.

The Progress So Far

Things are going remarkably well with the new release and the few issues that we have faced so far have been addressed very quickly. We have all hands on ExchangeDefender at the moment and are doing all we can to make the product rock solid and inform everyone of the changes and get you to take what I feel is once in a lifetime sale you will see in ExchangeDefender. ExchangeDefender 5 is a radical change in our business model and really the first in our industry, so we want to thank those of you that have helped us build it. The promotion runs through March 1st or first 250,000 mailboxes, whichever comes first.

So far so good! Thank you for your business and keep those emails coming, I’m really happy to read the market response about ExchangeDefender 5!

ExchangeDefender 5 Released – Update Policy

Thank you all for helping us with ExchangeDefender 5 – it is now up and running and the new UI’s are drawing a lot of attention. So far everything is moving well but I wanted to share the official policy when it comes to addressing bugs and issues.

Through Jan 1st, 2010 we will be making daily updates to the portal to patch any bugs and optimize the site as much as we can. I’d like to ask for your patience and documentation of anything that seems out of place, we are working on the product constantly for the next few weeks.

You will be receiving an update on every new domain added and we will manually check each new account creation, deletion and modification to make sure everything is operating flawlessly.

As mentioned on the webcast, ExchangeDefender 5 is a fully modular system and we do not anticipate releasing another point release in the future. Updates, enhancements and optimizations along with new features will be released on a monthly and quarterly basis from now on.

Again, thank you for your patience and your business – we hope you enjoy ExchangeDefender 5!

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE, CEO Own Web Now Corp

P.S. Webcasts will be released this week.

ExchangeDefender 5.. So Far

Last week I got the pleasure of finally unloading the business pitch about ExchangeDefender 5 and all the features we’ve built for this new business model.

If you missed the webcast, you can download it here.

If you have any questions about what we’re up to or how it stacks up with what you’re currently using – please take the compete challenge.

Make no mistake, there is no comparison to the feature set, price or organization that stands behind the solution. Simply, none. Take a look at the PDF and find another SAS 70 Type II audited company that will deliver all that for 75 cents / mailbox and you’ll be right back here. We worked very hard to build this offering and make our partners winners in 2010. We’ve made serious investments and addressed some of the “you’ll never see that happen” concerns and comments we’ve gotten over the years.

So let’s talk about some less-than-glamorous changes in ExchangeDefender 5:

SMTP tempfail

Our new SMTP implementation has reduced the inbound mail flow by 91%. It went live with ExchangeDefender 5 backend which is the reason why you have so little SPAM to deal with or review all of a sudden.

“I have to admit that I never looked at the old reports because they had nothing but junk. I love the new short list and it still hasn’t caught a single piece of real mail. Nice combination!”

What does this mean for you? Well, less SPAM to review. Less likelyhood that the user will blindly whitelist a forged address and let a ton of SPAM in. Less storage on the server. More attentive users. Less SPAM or accidental whitelist slippage. Overall, less nightmares.

Want more? ExchangeDefender will give you an option (for free) to queue up to 1 month of SPAM on our servers. This way, if you take a 3 week vacation, you can still access the SPAM that got trapped while you’re out. Nobody else does this.

Support Tiering

Once upon a time, I answered the phone. Every time.

That’s because I was the only one working at Own Web Now Corp.

Grow by leaps and bounds and you get a logistical nightmare of providing expert support, knowledge and customer service around the clock. At the end of the day, we are paid for our performance and reliability (SLA) – not for the customer service and brownie points. The new support escalation process has been fantastic, we got a ton of great comments and we’re still working out all the details as well.

But don’t take my word for it, here is the impression our partners get:

“I called in to Travis today to ask about the intended cutover process (was it worth me getting something rolling now before the upgrade or should I wait?)  I have to tell you that might have been the (good) Customer Service example of the month (although his competition at Intuit yesterday left him plenty of room).  He answered all the questions directly and more importantly I was impressed with what he did with the ones he COULDN’T answer.  He excused himself momentarily as he wrote them down on the whiteboard to insure he asked (whomever) before he got back to me.  He confirmed my email address and phone number and then proceeded to tell me what he was going to do and by when.  (And he did all of that in an accent I could understand!)

If you have an employee of the <timeframe> – I nominate Travis.  Not for going above and beyond.  Not for being outstanding.  Just for doing his job well and leaving this individual with a perception of having been well taken care of.  He didn’t fix all my sh*t but he did his job so well, I didn’t care.  That’s all we ask for with customer f*ckig service.” 

We don’t consider our support a cost center – we consider it to be a key feature in our service. Our new escalation let’s everyone document the case, the smartest and right person to solve the problem and the nicest and most market aware person to call you back when you have a true problem.

The Backend

ExchangeDefender 5 has been live on the backend and running flawlessly for a while now. In addition to reducing the load, reducing the SPAM counts and making the overall system more effective we have noticed the following changes:

1. Lowest whitelist / blacklist activity of the year (fewer false whitelists of forged addresses)
2. Faster login and message search due to database compression
3. Faster message delivery due to the elimination of deliver/deliver across different SPAM confidence levels that got misused.
4. No complaints about delays.
5. No complaints about the whitelists with the new MagicKey infrastructure.

We have made the system more efficient, less burdensome and managing SPAM has become an afterthought. Now we turn to making profits with everything else ExchangeDefender brings you free of charge.

Next Steps

Our new User, Domain Administrator and Service Provider UI launches this week (on December 8th) and if you’re technical you need to be there. I will be holding three live webinars and launching ExchangeDefender 5 in the final one, at 10 PM. Here are the webinars, the first two have just a few seats left:

Tuesday, December 8th, 7 AM – 8 AM EST

Tuesday, December 8th, 3 PM – 4 PM EST

Tuesday, December 8th, 10 PM – 11 PM EST

So to review:

If you missed the first webcast, download it from here and find out the business proposition. If you are currently not on ExchangeDefender, you seriously need to figure out what you’re missing. Finally, register for the 3 webcasts due next week to showcase the new UI launch. So far, things are going great!

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE

CEO, Own Web Now Corp

P.S. One of my competitors in this space that I have a pretty good relationship with told me today that I’m killing him and when the torture will be over. Which brings me to the funny conversation I had in the parking lot earlier tonight as we were leaving the office and I tried to fill in a few holes in the details. My coworkers response: “Wow. We are going to be doing all that?” – yep, folks, it’s on.

Big changes at ExchangeDefender

We have some new and exciting changes coming to ExchangeDefender with the new release now less than two weeks from launch. However, I wanted to introduce you to some network-wide changes and explain them to the best of my ability so you can clearly communicate them to your clients.

If you take a look at www.ownwebnow.com/new and sign up for one of our webcasts, you will notice that there are a ton of new features coming to ExchangeDefender. We are also running a huge sales special. No, we are not a car lot, we don’t “make it up with volume” but by optimizing our technology.

Starting November 23, 2009 we will no longer accept messages from known spammers that have been listed on SpamCop and SpamHaus realtime blacklists. We have used SpamCop and SpamHaus to automatically drop non-whitelisted messages into the SureSPAM quarantine and during that time we have had less than 0.0000000001% release rate with an overwhelming number of released messages being forged junk messages. To put it even more plainly, even the messages from these servers that our clients thought were legitimate turned out to be fraudulent.

This has become even more obvious lately as spoofing has become more and more common. Say a client whitelists “@aol.com” or “@live.com” domain. ExchangeDefender will look at the header of the incoming message and even though we know it’s on multiple RBL’s, we will accept it and deliver it to the user as a non-spam. This has increased the complaint rate by our users who say more and more SPAM is getting through while they knowingly whitelisted domains that are often spoofed.

We will be joining almost all of the other major providers that do not accept mail from the known SPAM addresses.

Wait, you’re going to be deleting my mail?

No. We will only be deferring them. Every message reviewed by ExchangeDefender and confirmed to be on a RBL will be temporarily deferred (not accepted) and the remote senders server will attempt to send the message again later. Since messages on SpamCop and SpamHaus are not accepted by any of the large service providers, the sender will be alerted by dozens of other recipients who automatically reject messages on RBL networks. They will not only not be able to send mail to you but to anyone else.

We believe that if the sender is legitimate, they will address the RBL situation quickly and messages will be delivered to us promptly. However, if they are a known source of SPAM and choose to do nothing about distributing viruses and/or SPAM we have to do what’s in the best interest of the network and all the users that it protects.

We don’t expect this to be an issue as it really is a norm in the industry and virtually nobody knowingly accepts SPAM from addresses on these large, reputable commercial RBLs. SpamHaus and SpamCop come with excellent reputation and our own statistical models indicate that this will be a nonissue. This policy has been in place with our Exchange 2007 hosting network and our virtual web / mail hosting platform for over a year without complaints.

But we wanted you to know why your SPAM counts will drop dramatically ahead of time.

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE

CEO, Own Web Now Corp