Our official policy on RBL/blacklists
With more and more misconfigured mail servers generating junk rejections we felt it was time to discuss our official policy on realtime blacklists (RBL) and the extent to which we support them.
First of all, all Own Web Now Corp mail servers and every piece of mail leaving our network is scanned for SPAM, Viruses, malware and just about everything we scan inbound mail for we also scan outbound mail for. We do not allow open/blind relaying, we disinfect anything dangerous and take every precaution to keep dangerous content off the Internet. However, from time to time something may slip. Clients still get infected with viruses, clients still use weak passwords or their systems that open up their infrastructure to worms and mail blasts, stuff happens.
OWN Network Operations monitors network activity and RBL lookups 24/7/365 and if there is an item that slipped our post and made it into an RBL (it usually takes just one piece) we immediately quarantine the user and request removal. We monitor over 100 RBLs and immediately act to make sure none of your mail is returned or bounced.
However, as more and more mail server administrators lose control over their servers, they start implementing policies that affect the ability to deliver legitimate mail to them. Because some of the best RBLs are also commercial some users stoop to stealing DNS RBL zones, longer RBL lookup caching to avoid being rate-limited and kicked off the free service, or their mail servers simply have no resources to fight with the SPAM.
Because our servers act as a transparent stateful proxies, meaning that we deliver your mail on your behalf, if there is a time that we have to return the message you will see outbound.exchangedefender.com as the server providing information on why the message was returned. This does not mean that outbound.exchangedefender.com rejected your message, it is simply quoting the error it received from the remote server.
Own Web Now Corp does not have control of the remote servers, it usually does not have a relationship or contact information for neither the sending server (you) or the recipient (where you are sending mail) so we are unable to help with any rejections that happen outside of the generally accepted rules and protocols around mail delivery. If the mail server on the other side didn’t implement their RBL directives correctly, if they are overloaded, if they manually chose to program in a configuration to reject your mail or anything out of the normal course of server management – we can’t help.
If you are seeing sources that are not adhering to these generally accepted rules such as quoting why the IP was blocked or message returned, we recommend you remove outbound.exchangedefender.com from your smarthost configuration and route messages to them directly. If that fails as well, try to contact the mail server administrator if you can locate their contact information. If you are tech savvy, you can create an SMTP connector for a given address space and route mail for particular domains directly to their mail servers, bypassing ExchangeDefender outbound proxies completely.
Just to repeat, we constantly monitor network traffic and actively keep our servers off RBLs that you can find at www.dnsstuff.com. We do everything in our power to assure mail delivery but if the configuration change on the remote end specifically interferes with that delivery that is the place you need to contact and find a way to get mail from your network delivered to theirs.
Conference Call Tonight, Wednesday Jan 16
Please remember that our monthly conference call, one of many this year, is taking place tonight, Wednesday, January 16th at 4 PM EST (22:00 GMT, 2 PM PST, Jan 17 9:00 AM EDT/Sydney). We have found from previous conference calls that this time slot is the most attended compromise of time zones across our global client base and we will make every effort to record the conference call and post it for your listening pleasure if you are unable to attend.
The purpose of the call is to take feature requests for the upcoming Own Web Now Service Manager extension of Own Web Now Portal (Shockey Monkey) to streamline ordering, provisioning and initial support of our growing product lines. We will quickly discuss the features that we have already put into the product and would like to see what else might be helpful in the software to reduce the cost and time required to purchase and provision Own Web Now Products.
The conference call number is in the monthly Own Web Now News newsletter sent on January 5th. If you are unable to attend but still have a question or comment that you would like us to discuss, please email confcall@ownwebnow.com and we will consider adding it to the presentation. If you do not have the newsletter handy, you can get the dialin phone number from our support portal (on the front page announcements)
Note: This conference call is meant specifically for the discussion of the service manager feature set, we will not be able to answer questions or offer guidance regarding the schedules or features of our other products.
If you have important email to send save it for tomorrow
January 2nd, when it falls on a weekday, is the worst day of the year to send email on. From business perspective, it’s the first day of the calendar year so everyone is back and probably from more than just a few days off, some even two weeks off. From the technical side, this is also the first day of the year that IT admins come back to work, doing the tasks they do to keep the systems working, usually catching up on a few days of missed maintenance tasks.
Every year the SPAM problem gets worse. On January 2nd not only are you going to be fighting maintenance intervals that didn’t take place but also people coming back from work and catching up to days of piled up emails, where catching up means sending out even more mail. Most email servers out there are overloaded with just the SPAM problem alone, compounding a few days of email correspondence on top of it will make today the least likely day for your email message to be delivered and read.
So if you have a newsletter, a really important note, a critical deadline to meet or an important contact that you absolutely have to reach… email is not your friend on January 2nd.
Of note, ExchangeDefender is currently performing at 43% capacity (10 AM EST, -5:00 GMT)
Free Urgent Support Requests Today (VoIP Issue)
The following was posted on the NOC group site this morning:
Our VoIP provider (IAX-PSTN termination service) is performing routine maintenance on our accounts in order to port some of our numbers from third party services and telcos. We have been advised to expect outages throughout the day as their proxy servers are updated to route new numbers to us, after which we will be programming the proper DID routes in our system.
As a result, our phone systems may not be the most reliable way to reach us today, January 2nd, 2008. If you have an urgent issue, or even an issue that you would like human followup on, please post a support request at https://support.ownwebnow.com.
I understand this may be inconvenient for some of you that need to speak to us, NOW, so to bridge the gap we’ll waive charges on all Urgent cases opened in the system today only, January 2nd, 2008. If you need a callback right away open an urgent ticket with your phone number and extension we can reach you at and we will contact you promptly.
Thank you,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
Communications Platform Upgraded
Over the weekend we completed our communications overhaul with an upgrade to the core of our network based around Exchange 2007 and Asterisk VoIP. We have upgraded our infrastructure to Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1, Asterisk (Trixbox) to the latest stable edition and we have also added the following components: Microsoft Office Communications Server, Microsoft Responsepoint and Microsoft Livemeeting. We are also still in process of finalizing the SIP/IAX2 connectivity as we have brought another provider into the mix.
The above upgrade to our major communication systems was in order to help us connect better with you. These solutions will allow us to provide more personal and direct support, become more responsive and efficient. I hope you can be patient with us over the next day or two while the new phone numbers are programmed in and we get all our voicemails and voice prompts together.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
OWN Guide for Advanced Mail Server Settings Options For Shared Hosting Clients
Long title, short answer: This is how you get around the port 25 filtering/restrictions ISPs enforce. It’s also the most secure way to configure your mail client to send and receive mail from Own Web Now. In short, this is how you should be configuring your mail clients with Own Web Now virtual mail hosting.
In the guide: Walkthrough of SSL setup for SMTP, POP3 and IMAP for Windows Mail, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Entourage.
Response to recent Hosted SMTP issues
I wanted to take a moment to offer you an update on what we are doing to address the growing uselessness of hosted pop3/smtp as a means to communication over the Internet. The following is merely a status update, it does not offer an explicit date or implementation at which it may become available, only an indication that we are working on it. Support staff will not be able to give you an ETA.
Not a day goes by that we do not address at least a dozen support tickets with one ISP after another causing traffic interruption via port 25. Whether it is individual providers doing network policing and shaping intentionally, or they are being overloaded and experimenting new policies is inconclusive. What does appear to remain as a fact is that the remote SMTP access is rapidly becoming too unreliable for business use. The current recommendation is to rely on the SMTP server issued by your Internet Service Provider to relay mail.
Most providers outright proxy the port 25 connections through their networks. Bell South (AT&T) for example routes all port 25 traffic through their SMTP servers. Some Internet Service Providers are also enforcing SMTP auth on their users, making you authenticate against their SMTP servers. Some are silently dropping traffic on SMTP port 25. The problem becomes more impactful for mobile workers, mobile devices, etc.
We are working on providing alternate means for secure and reliable SMTP relay. All of the soon-to-be-proposed measures will require client reconfiguration. We hope that the additional services will further provide our client base with a reliable SMTP relay and ability to send/receive mail while roaming without depending on port 25. While we do offer SMTP via SSL, SMTP Auth, SMTP via ports 2525 and 25252 the documentation for those processes needs some work and we intend to provide it.
Note: Above only applies to our POP3/SMTP hosting service, not ExchangeDefender.
Considering Managed Offsite Backups
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.
Offsite Backup Servers Updated
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.
We’re taking a long weekend off
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.