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ExchangeDefender Blog

Hosted Services

Over the past few months the AhSay Offsite Backup and Replication service has surpassed our stability expectations and we are considering offering it as a managed service through our partners. Currently, AhSay is the solution we use in-house on all our servers for georedundant backups and we also offer it at cost to our partner base (at cost = your technical support comes directly from AhSay). We have met many of you that would like an additional tier, one at which we take care of all the backups and the logistics.

Here is what we are currently considering:

  • Agents customized, branded and installed on the clients server(s)
  • Advanced configuration support for multiple backup sets against the same username/password set
  • Failed backup management (find out why backup failed, trigger a manual backup, fix the problem if possible)
  • Monthly, quarterly or annual offsite data hardcopy
  • Quota management and upgrades

From our support tracking on offsite backup, and your feedback, we have concluded that these are the biggest pain points you are currently experiencing and we would like to help. The data hardcopy involves shipping a hard drive with all the offsite data at a set interval, for example, we could ship a 250GB USB drive every quarter at a cost of $300 and let the client keep it in their safety deposit box. In terms of quota management, we can tell when the data is growing very closely to the quota limit and will ask for upgrade (or automatic upgrade permission, within reason) so that backup jobs do not fail. Finally, log troubleshooting and backup job adjustment – when it fails find out why it happened and fix it.

We are not ready to announce the pricing yet but this will not be at-cost product, it would be a full service product.

It is important to note that we still do not expect to offer this service as a retail product to be purchased off our web site, it is still going to be a partner-sold service. The reasoning behind this is that as good as we are at running the infrastructure we do not have the bandwidth to discuss the clients disaster recovery needs and requirements, their business continuity schedule or the amount of data that should be held offsite.

General

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.

General

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.

ExchangeDefender

Last month we announced full ExchangeDefender integration with MSP packages such as Connectwise and Autotask. However, the data those suites “report” is superficial at best and we have been working since to improve the reporting “eye-candy” provided by ExchangeDefender. After all, executives respond to pretty charts and we’re looking for a way to allow you to embed these onto your own web site – letting your customers see them as a part of your own suite!

But, for the time being, we are working on it hard. Here is what you can produce today: 

Executivespamreports

This is available on demand via service provider control panel and shows you the past 30 days of ExchangeDefender performance. There are four important sections. The top section breaks down the mail flow by day. We have taken your feedback and have changed the chart type to “stacked” so that the message float appears as a pile of messages. I agree that it more clearly illustrates the problem we solve, the tip of it is the actual messages that your employees would actually be reading. The second section lists the totals for SPAM, SureSPAM, Total Mail and Real Mail as well as the percentage of real messages that got through to your users. The percentage numbers are staggering, when even after discarding up to 96% of inbound mail as a virus, trojan, malware, confirmed bulk mail or known spammer piece and you still receive a single digit number out of that tiny amount of mail.. wow. Third section is for our international users that actually pay  for bandwidth. The chart identifies how much of your bandwidth went to SPAM and SureSPAM that you never would have to see. Again, totals look ridiculous.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the three discussion points:

Your domain vlad.net received 7,543 messages, which excludes directory harvesting attacks, denial of service attacks, known spammers, from senders on multiple blacklists. This total usually represents less than 20% of messages your mail server would have to process if you did not have VladDefender.

Your domain vlad.net received 6,507 SPAM messages, which your employees did not have to read/delete accounting for at least 3.615 hours of saved productivity*.

Your domain vlad.net received only 4,074 Kb out of 23,235 Kb that was sent to it, reducing bandwidth utilization and increasing server availability. *

We felt it was important to have an executive summary under all the graps, tables and data. While it is unusual to have an executive summary at the bottom of the report, we felt that the graphs provided such a huge visual impact that the summary up top would just have taken away from it.

What’s next?

That is totally up to you.

The goal for ExchangeDefender in 2007 has been to become more MSP friendly. 100% of the features and specifications have been driven by the MSP feedback and we continue to develop the software you are asking us for. We aim to continue.

So, take your best shot. What would make this more valuable?

One thing we are working for is embeddable statistics that you can include in your web pages or customers web pages. Remember that these graps are both animated and interactive – as well as VERY fast to generate. We feel it is crucial to present this data in a convenient and interactive form in addition to the monthly executive meeting and printed reports you may already be providing. This extends to our other products as well, these “gadgets” can play a huge part in your IT presence at your customers site and we want to make them as available and as accessible as we can. 

Hosted Services

Earlier today we completed an upgrade of our Offsite Backup software to AhSay 5.2.2.5 which provides new functionality, flexibility and further breakfix upgrades. This feature has been in beta testing internally for the past three weeks and has shown a lot of promise towards overcoming limitations the previous edition had. The update has been completed for our entire network, affecting all frontend, backend and replication servers.

Furthermore, this edition allows us to provide a more managed service surrounding the offsite backup suite because we have more control over the system and can proactively address issues like quota upgrades, failed backup causes and troubleshooting, etc.

These are the latest, generic clients but are not required, previous agents will work just fine.

Update: 6:25 EST; We have been working with AhSay on some performance tuning fixes for about two hours now. We have decided to shut down a part of the frontend network to optimize the network efficiency. Some of you have also complained about the display of AhSay logos on the frontpage as well as the other identifying marks that we are currently trying to remove. We expect this maintenance to take until roughly noon EST and affect all our customers.

Hosted Services

Everyone deserves a break after a hard week of work. Last weekend was the most intense maintenance cycle for us ever and after a few all-nighters the 7/24/365 needs a bit of a break. Our offices will be closed this weekend, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, September 28, 29 and 30th and all project, maintenance and most low tier support will be suspended. Regular activity will resume on Monday, October 1st.

All urgent and high priority cases will still be handled under the promised SLA.

This notice does not apply to our enterprise-grade client base.

ExchangeDefender

Nothing gets by our user base; We may have tipped our hat a little with the SQL upgrade and a test of the message previews showing up in the control panels this morning and… yes.. yes, we are bringing full message previews to the ExchangeDefender web interface this fall. This upgrade is scheduled to launch along with our AJAX interface upgrade and will give you the ability to highlight a message and click to view the body directly from the web site. You’ll then have an option to reply right there without waiting to deliver or trust the sender, or do any combination of the three.

The interface preview you may have seen overnight was just that – a preview – and will not officially become a feature until November/December timeline. We have another SQL maintenance interval scheduled for tonight and I figured I owed you an explanation for why there seems to be so much “maintenance” as of late.

General

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

ExchangeDefender

During our preparation for ExchangeDefender Administrator and Service Provider daily reports we discovered a big performance issue in our reporting engine, big enough to cause us to rewrite the affected code immediately and alter our database schema. During the new engine rollout the reporting functionality was not at 100% and not all users had their daily reports generated. If your daily reports are set to be generated between 3:30 AM EST and 5:30 AM EST, your report may not have been generated. The reporting engine optimization / bugfix did not affect intraday reports.

We are in process of slowly resending the daily reports, they will arrive today. If your users need a report and it has not been delivered to them yet please remember that you now have multiple options:

– You can resend their daily report through the control panel on demand (report sent out within 60 seconds)

– You can tell the users how to access the quarantines directly (easiest and most efficient way) via https://admin.exchangedefender.com

– You can let their SPAM czar go through their mail for them.

We are currently considering not offering SPAM digest reports to end users anymore. The amount of information we can offer via email is very limited and inefficient. We can provide far more information (and make the user far more productive) if they looked at the reports over the web and are considering generating daily and intraday reports with summary data only and a link to the web interface – if there is enough junk mail to warrant a review, the user will click and see all the email that is waiting for them. If it is not, at least we will spare the user the trouble of their Outlook hanging for 8 minutes while they try to open an email thats more than 2 Kb in size. You will of course be given an option of sending users daily/intraday email summaries or full digest reports, with the summary of course being the default. We figure this may not be the most popular decision with some users to please let us know if you have an opinion.

ExchangeDefender

We’re on the eve of the 3rd Annual ConnectWise Partner Summit and I’m proud to announce that ExchangeDefender fully integrates into ConnectWise’s Managed Mail sync as well as Management Report documents. Want to get it done tonight? It takes 5–10 minutes tops, just download this document and follow the directions:

Whitepaper: ConnectWise sync with ExchangeDefender How-To

Thats right, in 5–10 minutes you can have your ConnectWise deployment syncing up with ExchangeDefender and becoming a regular resident on your Management Reports.

Enjoy the conference, enjoy Tampa and enjoy the integration we now offer into your ConnectWise deployment.