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:
- Lowest whitelist / blacklist activity of the year (fewer false whitelists of forged addresses)
- Faster login and message search due to database compression
- Faster message delivery due to the elimination of deliver/deliver across different SPAM confidence levels that got misused.
- No complaints about delays.
- 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
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
ExchangeDefender at Microsoft WPC
Please visit us in booth #1346 at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans March 13-16th.
Next week we will be sponsoring the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. If you are attending, please stop by booth #1346. We have a number of new plans that we are excited to discuss. If you are missing the event, we will also be at the CompTIA Breakaway in Las Vegas, MSP University in Santa Ana, ConnectWise Summit in Orlando and a handful of ASCII events and user groups. This is in addition to the many ASCII, MSPU, Autotask, Microsoft TechEd and HTG events we have participated in so far this year.
So the obvious question should be: why go to all these events when the economy is doing so poorly? Over the past year we have seen many companies go under or slow down significantly because they were not prepared to address the demands of the marketplace. Companies that have survived and are now thriving are doing so thanks to solid management, execution and product matrix. I personally feel that we are at the greatest wave of change on the Internet ever since it started being used for commerce and business. Business demands for Internet applications are changing, as are support requirements, making many of the old technology business models obsolete. In order to stay at the front as an innovator in this industry, we have to work closer with our partners and our clients.
My one agenda for 2009 was to convert many of the experimental and community projects into professional services our clients and partners could count on. This involves working very closely with our partners to develop the features the clients are actually working on, not necessarily the ones we think we can sell. This interaction has so far been responsible for our PSA as well as the PSA integrations with Autotask, ConnectWise and Zenith Infotech. It has also resulted in record growth in our revenues and profits, some of which we are contributing to community projects to encourage everyone to work with us more closely.
So consider this an invitation – we want to work with everyone. Feel free to email me to get started.
-Vlad
To download the remainder of the newsletter please click here.
New ExchangeDefender Client Software Suite
We are proud to announce an upgrade for ExchangeDefender Client Software Suite. You can read more about the software here. They are free and recommended for client interaction with ExchangeDefender service.
Bug Fixes – 03/10/2009
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– Fixed an issue causing some users spam/surespam to not be displayed correctly.
– Fixed an issue where the application would Pop-up each time the application loaded.Features – 03/10/2009
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– Added an “About Form”
– Automatic version checking has been added as a feature upon viewing the about page.
There are several other minor bug fixes. If the current software is working for you there is no reason to upgrade. However, if you do experience an issue our support teams will ask you to upgrade to the latest version before working the case.
Downloads are available at www.exchangedefender.com
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.
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!
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.