ExchangeDefender Desktop Agent (Spam Monitor)
Today we proudy introduce yet another way for users to conveniently get rid of Junk Mail and still have it all stored just a mouse click away, on a network far far away. ExchangeDefender Spam Monitor is a piece of .NET 2.0 software that runs on your computer and pops up a small bubble notification letting you know how much SPAM is waiting for you. If you ignore it, it goes away in seconds, if you click on it the browser pops up and logs you right into your account so you can quickly review your SPAM and go about your day.
SPAM Monitor runs as a standalone application and consumes just 74kb of memory. Double clicking on the icon brings up the configuration window that allows you to enter your ExchangeDefender email address and password. Right clicking on the icon gives you an option to suspend the agent or View Spam. Suspending the agent stops it from checking the web site and displaying hourly message counts while View Spam menu option launches the browser and gives the user access to their account.
The agent was designed to assist users that needed a realtime, accountable way to get to their SPAM without waiting for email reports, but who didn’t want to create desktop shortcuts. We also hope this allows our resellers to support their customers in a more efficient way – “Do you see the orange box with the X on it in the lower right hand corner? Right click and select View SPAM.”
We hope this makes Howard Cunningham happy 
ExchangeDefender BugFix Release 3.1.1
On December 16th, 2007 we will be releasing a massive update to the ExchangeDefender policy server, to account for a number of rather unpleasant bugs that have come up as a result of changes from 2.x to 3.0 and 3.1.
Because this is a large scale upgrade with lots of changes under the hood, there may be some temporary downtime while we roll the new system out. This downtime is only going to affect the web site https://admin.exchangedefender.com but mail will continue to flow and no other systems will experience issues. We expect the outages to last a few seconds at most as we reload one system after another.
We chose to announce this on the corporate blog instead of the Network Operations site because some of these bugs have been inconveniencing many of our users and we wanted to let you know that this bulk of updates addresses all the issues that have been brought up in our portal. Specific changelog will be posted at a later date.
This release will not have any new features and the new feature releases will resume on Jan 2, 2008. We have used the past two months to correct all the outstanding issues in the system, from nagging bugs to poor documentation, and I believe you will be very pleased with the results starting next Monday.
OWN Guide for Troubleshooting ExchangeDefender Delivery
We have folks at Own Web Now that do nothing but troubleshoot ExchangeDefender delivery issues all day long and we figured we’d share in the fun. This is the first draft of the document titled Troubleshooting ExchangeDefender Delivery and is meant to help the jr administrators master the art of troubleshooting SMTP.
Covered in the document are steps to troubleshoot inbound and outbound delivery, server configuration, IP restrictions and even how to help remote senders find out where the issue may be. I have been working hard on designing a troubleshooting portal (to send sample messages, check RBLs, etc) but we thought putting the whole best practices process on paper would be very helpful an save a few trouble tickets in the process.
Take a look at it, hope you enjoy it. Feedback is always appreciated.
Upgrading ExchangeDefender SQL Backends
Please be advised that we’re upgrading ExchangeDefender’s SQL Server backends throughout this week.
No services will be interrupted, however, you may see slight delays at times (from a few minutes to potentially 20–30 minutes if you are on a low bandwidth solution).
We expect this routine maintenance to be completed by Wednesday evening, EST.
Service work completed. We will do one final pass on Satuday evening, October 13, starting at 8 PM and ending at Midnight but all major work has been completed.
ExchangeDefender Advanced MSP Reporting
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:
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.
ExchangeDefender SPAM Previews Coming this Fall
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.
Daily Report Breakfix
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.
Got ConnectWise? Get ExchangeDefender with it!
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:
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.
New ExchangeDefender Reports! (Part 1)
New ExchangeDefender Reports are out! We have worked hard to bring the new reporting functionality to you and we hope you like the new information we are providing as well as what we are allowing you to remove from the report:
If you pardon the eraser tool you will notice that the layout of the reports has changed slightly and you will also notice some more information showing up in an unobtrusive way. So let’s look at the improvements:
- Summary Guide – Top right blue box “You are reading an email summary…” has been the most demanded feature by our customers and partners alike because it gives you single-click access to the ExchangeDefender portal. Click on the link to access your settings, searchable quarantines and more.
- Email Activity Stats – Directly above the SPAM quarantines. This new summary field is showing you the total activity during this reporting period and helps address those “we are not receiving any email” complaints that users tend to feel once ExchangeDefender comes to life.
- Warnings & Caveats – Bottom of the message. There are two warnings so let’s look at them carefully. “You chose to be notified of all SPAM quarantines.” is printed when you chose to receive full/complete SPAM reports. If you have a ton of email addresses and aliases it can get annoying to scroll down rows and rows of email addresses that never receive email just to see “No messages in this quarantine” so we gave you an option to suppress empty quarantine reports. Second warning is to let the user know that these reports do not include viruses, address book attacks, NDR storms, mailbox floods, mailbombs and other causual Internet annoyances. On a daily basis we only accept and process up to 80% of the inbound mail, most of the 20% being part of multiple RBLs or confirmed SPAM content. Majority of that 20% is dismissed anyhow!
- Branding – Background, messages and logo are now brandable. If you are a service provider you can make this your own!
That’s all for the user facing problems! Stay tuned for the Administrator reports tomorrow!
Note: We addressed a bug in the reports that did not print a header message for the SureSPAM category. If you received a report prior to 8 AM EST on Monday, September 17th, you would have noticed your SPAM and SureSPAM bundled together.. After 8 AM EST you will see both quarantine contents broken down individually.
Alert: ExchangeDefender bounce notifications
We have received some reports of certain users emails bouncing on receipt. We are currently looking into the problem and will update the advisory shortly.
Update: 1:19 PM EST: Problem solved, 100% of the accounts are now online.
Update: 1:53 PM EST: ExchangeDefender has been reloaded and refreshed to assure absolutely everything is working perfectly. We have taken off administrative console access offline for the moment to determine the cause of network configuration failure. As mentioned in the 1:19 PM update, everything should be working perfectly fine and there should be no bounces.
Update: 2:16 PM EST: Notified ExchangeDefender administrators, updated trouble tickets and the recovery effort to deliver 800+/20+ inbound/outbound messages continues. This was a minor (albeit catastrophic) error in the ExchangeDefender network configuration that affected a small portion of our customer base but due to the distributed nature of the system it may have affected just about everyone. As a precaution, we have temporarily taken administrative interfaces offline to determine how this happened in the first place. Again, network, performance and system are at 100% at the moment with no known issues.
Update: 2:28 PM EST: Cause of network failure identified, fixed. Moving to the testing phase, control panels are still offline. 1/4 of the bounced messages have been recovered and delivered to the end users.
Update: 3:19 PM EST: Everything is still working perfectly fine. Our team is decrypting messages from the standby spool and dropping the messages by hand into the delivery queue. All “bounced” messages will still be delivered. Thanks to the technology behind LiveArchive, we are able to cache delivery so in case of bounces, like today, we can still manually drop the message into your mail server.
Update: 4:46 PM EST: Everything is back to normal, all external bounced mail has been delivered, 100% service restored and administrative control panels are restored as well.