ExchangeDefender Research Notice
For the past two weeks we have taken an unusual project: Find out why certain messages get deferred or delayed at random times to random recipients. While this task is something that we perform routinely through our support portal, my staff has taken a lot of abuse at the hands of something that is really not an ExchangeDefender issue or something we are capable of addressing.
Last week we have introduced a layer of monitoring service to ExchangeDefender that has been collecting data on failures our clients servers are experiencing. This data is being plotted for each IP address we hand off mail to. So far we have been able to identify users that have:
Inadequate Internet connections (bandwidth or reliability)
Inadequate Firewalls or routers (connections time out, get deferred or dropped randomly)
Configuration problems (lack of space, lack of resources)
We have made several adjustments to the way we deliver mail for the clients that have frequent or persistent delay problems. In each researched case we have been able to isolate the problem to the recipients servers or network not cooperating. We have attempted to replicate the scenario with servers / addresses that are not on the same ranges or networks to eliminate the possibility of network/routing causing a problem.
We are continuing our work on this because no user should be frustrated with the delays in their message delivery. If there is anything we can do to determine if these issues are persistent enough to recommend additional resources or spotlight problems that the admins or MSPs are not aware of, I’m glad to do so. It is in all our users best interest.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
P.S. There is only one legitimate reason for mail delays: Senders IP address is on a commercial RBL like SpamCop or SpamHaus. These messages are delayed intentionally and whitelisting does not affect the performance, they will get delayed. This behavior has been in place for a long time with ExchangeDefender and is not set to change: Senders on SpamCop and SpamHaus have been confirmed as spammers by independent parties and have not done anything to delist themselves. We can only assume that these resources are not managed and we just cannot trust mail from these hosts, even if you chose to trust the senders from those domains.
Take a listen: SPAM Show #1
Welcome to 2009! We’re half-way through the first month of the year, and things are going great. Thank you for a fantastic 2008, for your feedback, for your development support and, most of all, for your money. Own Web Now is a great company because its partners and clients invest in us by helping us deliver the exact software and services that are expected. I will not lie… 2008 was tough. We straightened out billing. We globalized half a dozen services. We added staff across the board and positioned the company to be by your side for years.
Now it’s payback time. My biggest regret in 2008 was that I did not spend enough time talking to you- my fellow partners and clients.
Today we are changing all that with the launch of Own Web Now’s SPAM Show. This podcast is meant to do two things:
1) Bring you up to speed with developments at Own Web Now
2) Provide you with the expert opinion on today’s top tech trends
Whether you own your own technology business or are responsible for a network of 64,000 users, time is scarce. Staying on top of all the technology developments and getting various opinions and experiences is a very difficult and time consuming task. Thankfully, I work with many intelligent people at Own Web Now and have a lot of friends in the IT field that talk to a lot of techies, and we will do our best to present a concise review of what you should be thinking about. (This used to be the most popular and most demanded quality of the SBS Show – people love to learn but they also like to be entertained and to save time.)
So to find out what is on my mind and what my friends are working on… just tune in and listen. The first show is online already:
Featuring Mark Crall from Tech Care Team and Stuart Selbst from SecureMyCompany, Inc. They discuss trends in cloud services, Kaseya, Google Reseller program and more.
Mark and Stuart are my go-to folks in the community and true leaders in our market. To find out more about them you can follow their blogs: Mark Crall’s blog. Stuart Selbst’s blog.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
Announcing ExchangeDefender Client Software Suite
ExchangeDefender, now in the 4th release of the product, is proud to add Client Software Suite to the portfolio of security and business continuity products covered under a single fee. Consisting of ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 agent and ExchangeDefender Desktop agent, the suite is uniquely positioned to help users interact with ExchangeDefender without having to leave their day-to-day computing experience inside Outlook 2007 or Windows Desktop.
Click here to download ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 Agent
Click here to download ExchangeDefender Windows Desktop
Click here to see the features overview
While the features of the two products overlap somewhat, each is designed for a specific audience. Outlook 2007 agent is primarily designed to let users interact with ExchangeDefender on demand, report SPAM that slips through and casually customize the service to their needs. Desktop agent is designed for the diehard email addict that needs hourly updates on the amount of SPAM, quick access to LiveArchive.
We will continue to develop both going forward and have plans to introduce web filtering, virus protection and web file sharing during 2009. We see attack vectors changing and becoming more social to compromise the security of more savvy technology users. With that threat, the software protecting our users must evolve as well.
As always we welcome feedback and suggestions on how to improve the software and make your clients and users more efficient and productive with our services. Please use the Development tab in our support portal to communicate directly with the development team.
Oh, did we mention that all this is FREE? Go ahead and download it now!
New ExchangeDefender Engine
Since December 15th we have been testing a new ExchangeDefender antispam engine that has gone into production last night, January 5th. The new engine improves SPAM filtering efficiency by nearly 800% and shows about 5% less false positives than the current engine.
This new system has been running in the background transparently simultaneously with our previous engine and did not impact operations. We have started to notice new trends in SPAM lately and have moved to improve filtering of the items that have not been accurately picked up by the network.
We want to thank you for submitting SPAM through our ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 agent as that has been critical in our ability to better protect you from junk. If you have not yet deployed the new ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 plugin, or the new ExchangeDefender Desktop please do so today. They are available for download on the homepage at www.exchangedefender.com
Enjoy your new, cleaner mailbox!
Welcome to 2009!
Dear Friends, Clients, Partners, Happy New Year!
Thank you for a fantastic 2008. Not only have we seen our service deployments and contracts grow at a tremendous rate but we have also undertaken a record expansion in our Global Network Services platform offering Exchange, SharePoint, Enteprise Offsite Backups, Virtual Hosting and more from the European Union (United Kingdom, Nethrelands, France and Germany), Canada as well as Australia. Our flagship product, ExchangeDefender, grew from a pure security service to one that also plays a key part in the business continuity and disaster recovery.
We look forward to an incredible 2009. With key hires and services delivery platform built for speed and value we believe that our solutions will be a great answer to what may be a tough economic cycle.
We will be introducing several new products in 2009.
We will also be making some interesting changes to the support of the existing offerings.
Happy New Year and best wishes for 2009!
Once you go black…
It’s no secret that we’ve had a phenomenal year at Own Web Now, thanks to the thousands of our partners that support, guide and deploy our products worldwide. Today is the day after Thanksgiving in United States, also known as Black Friday where frugal shoppers wake up early to get the best deals and save a lot of money.
As a small business, we know a lot about saving money.
And as a small business that was built on top of really hard work and dedication to the mission, we want to do something special for the people that work as hard as we do – while most are taking a day off. We want to do something we’ve never done before.
We’re going to hold our own Black Friday special sale today and today only. If you are currently an active partner (meaning you have some paid services with us) you can buy the following to run your own business:
Up to 5 Hosted Exchange 2007 mailboxes
20 GB Mailbox limit
20 GB SharePoint v3 DB limit
ExchangeDefender MSP Branding
$1 / month / mailbox (each)
Optional: $99 BES (setup), $0/month.
Valid from right now till midnight, Friday, November 28th, 2008. No rainchecks, not for resale (your own company only), not crippled/limited (full OWA, Outlook/MAPI) not a promotional offer.
Please place the request through the Services > Buy Services and mention this offer in the notes. Due to the expected demand there may be a 48 hour delay in activating your service. Offer valid only for partners with active/paying services on record prior to this posting.
SE
Wow, you are open today!
This subject has been heard and seen all over our support portal today as our global customers pause in wonder that we are working during Thanksgiving.
Yes, yes, yes, we are always open. No, we never close. As a global company doing business with partners in over 150 countries over 5 continents, we never take a break from working for you.
24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and every fourth we put in one more.
To all our partners around the world showing the same level of dedication you show to your clients, we wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving and thank you for your business!
Better Support!
Dear Partners, Clients and friends of Own Web Now,
Thank you for your loyalty.
Due to the unprecedented growth in our product portfolio that was built on the feedback and testing of our awesome partner base, the success of the new wave of OWN products from ExchangeDefender to Shockey Monkey, from Offsite Backups to SharePoint + Exchange and ongoing growth in the cloud services…. we’ve grown, again!
Starting yesterday we have added three new support teams already trained in everything we do across all platforms. This means better support for our products, ability to launch the new products and extend more commercial support for upcoming announcements (stay tuned)
You read that right. In this down economy we have invested in our future and doubled our support staff to keep you ahead of the curve. I hope this makes up for the recent support issues some have experienced, nearly all of my available support staff has been in training and training the new folks to make sure the support is perfect from day one.
This is our mission, this is our promise: As we grow, we will improve our service and deliver more value. Thank you for making this possible and for your continued business. To thank you for bringing your business and helping OWN grow I want you to keep an eye on the new pricing to be announced on this blog tomorrow. Pricing will go up (across product lines, some significantly) but current clients and providers will be paying even less in certain cases and will have the pricing tiers grandfathered for all future orders.
How is that for the true partnership? Again, thank you all!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
ExchangeDefender Bugfix Galore
Happy Monday! Over the weekend a ton of ExchangeDefender 4 bugfix requests went online and so far the support requests for the issues have all but disappeared. Here they are, in order of magnitude:
ExchangeDefender Email SPAM Reports
Late last week new ExchangeDefender SQL cluster for email report management went online to compensate for the growth in network capacity. Because it usually takes six to eight hours for replication to complete some reports over the weekend were generated with 0’s for SPAM totals, an error that has since been fixed.
Going forward, SPAM reports will be remain to be available but we are moving the feature to the “legacy” mode meaning we do not recommend them as the primary point of access to SPAM. By default, new accounts will have their email reports turned off unless they explicitly request the email reporting to be turned on. There will be no change to the current users and as noted above there will be far more capacity to provide current users with the reports and those that choose them forward.
Email reports have been a dark eye on the face of ExchangeDefender. Over 83% of ExchangeDefender clients have never even opened an ExchangeDefender SPAM report, and nearly 99% have never released a single piece of SPAM from them. We track these releases and have even noted that majority of the releases are forged SPAM itself.
This is why we have developed better tools to surround ExchangeDefender with – the new ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 Addin for Microsoft Outlook 2007, the ExchangeDefender Desktop Alerts for XP and Vista as well as the realtime web portal which is scheduled for 4.0 release this fall.
ExchangeDefender Password Resends
ExchangeDefender password resend request used to lead you to a blank screen and no email. This has been fixed, passwords are being sent now without issue.
ExchangeDefender Activation Optimizations
ExchangeDefender activations now take mere seconds (it used to take about 1 second to provision a single account) which globally meant it could take approximately an hour for the address to be fully provisioned. That has been throttled down to allowing over 5,000 user activations per minute.
ExchangeDefender LiveArchive Sync
Problems with ExchangeDefender LiveArchive settings sync have been addressed and syncronization is now up-to-the minute. If you’re ever stuck waiting more than 60 seconds for a password change or a setting change you might want to close your browser and retry.
More exciting changes are on their way, to be announced tomorrow.
Just Released: ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 Addin
ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 Addin has been released and is available for immediate download at www.exchangedefender.com. We have designed this new software to help you interact with the ExchangeDefender security service without leaving the comfort of your Microsoft Outlook 2007 interface. No more waiting for reports, no more trying to guess the ExchangeDefender portal password, no more hunting for statistics or forwarding SPAM – we have simplified the whole process of interacting with the service that keeps your mailbox clean.
- What can you do with ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 Addin? Just about everything you can do from the web portal!
- You can view the realtime SPAM and SureSPAM quarantines right in your Outlook at a click of a button.
- Manage your trusted senders list.
- Quickly locate messages by searching for subject or sender.
- Report SPAM to improve filtering or send email to our team for troubleshooting.
- View domain statistics and see what ExchangeDefender is doing.
Of course, every aspect of the software is brandable to reflect your corporate image, we’ve even included documentation templates that you can use to inform your users of this new solution that is provided at no additional cost!