UPDATE: Exchange Migration

We have been keeping our partners and clients in the loop on the migration issues, around 340 accounts are still affected and we are doing everything in our power to get the last users back to productivity. As usual, all technical stuff is located on our NOC which has been updated regularly through the day/night since the first issue with legacy disconnections started:

ExchangeDefender Migration NOC Post

In the meantime:

If you are among the affected users rest assured we are doing all we can and working around the clock to get you back into your Inbox. However, just because your Outlook won’t start up doesn’t mean you cannot send and receive email from anywhere in the world. Here are the steps to enable the LiveArchive failover:

1. Go to our admin portal at https://admin.exchangedefender.com. Login as the domain admin (just type in your domain name, if you do not have the password you can get a password reminder or open a ticket with subject “LIVE ARCHIVE UNLOCK” and we’ll reset it for you)

3. After you set the password it should take 1 minute for it to apply.

4. Instruct the user to go to https://nge.exchangedefender.com. Their username is their login, their password should let them in. If you run into an issue logging in, open a ticket “LIVEARCHIVE USER” with email, password and we will reset the credentials for you.

This is not available just for the affected ExchangeDefender mailboxes, this is available and included in your service for everything we protect – public folders, shared mailboxes, etc. If a folder or user is missing just create an address as a user in admin.exchangedefender.com, enable LiveArchive, set credentials, and you’ll be back to sending/receiving email.

We are still working on this, and we will not stop until everyone is back to normal, on the new platform that will be the end of legacy Exchange issues we’ve had to contend for so long. Please stay on top of the NOC, we are doing the best we can to keep everyone updated but priority is currently on restoring access and service. If your clients are upset, understandably, please point them to LiveArchive and get them back to work, it’s functional on mobile as well as the PC. Our current status is that we’re restoring mail flow and mail access to anyone, with public folder infrastructure to follow later today.

Access to Live Archive – https://nge.exchangedefender.com/

ExchangeDefender Feedback Loop – SPAM Reporting

ExchangeDefender SPAM Reporting (Feedback Loop) is a simple way for users to report SPAM messages that get delivered to their Inbox. This is a user-level feature in ExchangeDefender that inserts a link at the bottom of each processed email and gives users one-click reporting and blacklist management. Service providers and domain administrators can customize the appearance of the link that is automatically inserted at the bottom of the message.

Feedback Loop Feature

Login as the domain administrator And click on Mail Delivery > SPAM Feedback Loop. Click on Enable Feedback Loop Feature, make any optional additions to the signature, and click Save.

Enable Feedback Loop Reporting for Users

Once the feature has been enabled for the domain, Users will get a new feature in their Settings. Click on Settings > Settings and click on the SPAM Feedback Loop to enable signatures for email addresses associated with this user.

What does it look like?

The signature you designed on the Domain admin level will appear at the bottom of every HTML/text message that arrives in your Inbox. When the users click on the link it will open a web browser and take them to their ExchangeDefender account (if they are not logged in, they will see the login screen).

Once authenticated, the user can review the message, confirm that’s something they don’t want to see again, and we’ll look into it and make sure messages similar to the one they are reporting is not delivered to the Inbox.Users also have an option of providing feedback, uploading a copy of .msg file, as well as a checkbox that will automatically place the sender domain on a blacklist.

In conclusion, we realize that not everyone lives in Outlook or a web browser all day – so we’ve designed this process to help users that are mobile, or that interact with ExchangeDefender very infrequently – reporting and getting rid of SPAM is now just a click away. It also helps us improve the performance and accuracy of our filtering.

Try it out today!

Killing Spam from the Quarantine

On March 12th our entire team left our offices and everyone has been working remotely, nearly around the clock, to keep everyone secure and productive. I returned from Los Angeles on a redeye flight, held a quick meeting in our parking lot 10 feet away from everyone – and nobody has been to the office since. I wanted to write a brief note to our clients and partners to let you know how we’re doing and what we are up to.

Technical Toll

Managing a massive international operation, that spans continents and data centers that have taken similar work-from-home precaution, has been a massive technical challenge. Just because we’re not there doesn’t mean that hard drives don’t die, that servers don’t melt down, that switches and firewalls and routers don’t go through their usual cycles. Thankfully the technical changes we’ve made to our cloud in 2017-2018 have made it possible for us to keep service levels at normal levels.

The load on our tech has increased steadily – I’m sure you’ve noticed that every single person you’ve ever interacted with has emailed you about their Covid-19 policy. You’ve probably also gotten an email from every loan scam operation on the planet trying to get you PPP/EIDL.

Perhaps most regretfully, the scum of the earth that we exist to eradicate has picked up their activity exponentially. Never in my life have I seen charts and load graphs like we’ve experienced over the past month. Hackers and scammers know that most people are working from home, where IT security is mostly non-existent, and that makes all those endpoints ripe for hacking. Which immediately becomes a source of SPAM and more malware.

Things were bad before, now they are bad x ugly. And we’ve been working around the clock to keep the threats quarantined.

Personal Toll

IT security is a passion of everyone that works here. We’ve built all the infrastructure, systems, monitoring, reporting – you name it – so when someone finds a way to get SPAM through it’s a very personal failure for our team.

Most of us live in Florida, where just about everything has been shut down (I’m sure you’ve read about Tom Brady getting kicked out of a public park). Have I mentioned how much I love my team? We have all been working far, far, far longer hours during the quarantine than we ever have before. We have system upgrades, software upgrades, new features, and some more exciting stuff that our partners and clients are going to need in order to save money after this quarantine ends. Needless to say, we’re tired.Nerves have also been on a somewhat of a thin line. We have a young-ish staff and most of us have families for whom we are not just providers but suddenly school teachers. Our partners and clients are in a similar boat. Those home frustrations can get even more pronounced when technology fails – and we have done our best to brush off some rather abusive behavior in the support portal. I get it, everything in the world is frustrating you, you’re losing control and visibility in general, and now you’ve got IT problems too. We keep on repeating “We’re here to serve, we’re here to help, we’re sorry for the inconvenience” and at no point in the past has this been more true than it is today.So overworked, cranky, abused, and locked down – but we’re still here. And we know most of you are in the same boat, sharing the same frustration. Hang in there, we’ll need to be at our best for the huge challenge that awaits us in supporting our clients as they get back to normal.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, I have the best team on the planet and I am so happy that we can keep you safe and productive during this uncertain time. I owe a debt of gratitude to them that I will repay eventually. But first, foremost, and most important – thank you. As large of a footprint as we may have, we are still a small business and thanks to our clients loyalty we have been able to continue working, growing, and serving during the time that many businesses have had to turn to the government for a bailout. My team and I are eternally grateful. People like to say “shop small business” but I have lost the count of times that we’ve been fired for Office 365 or a competitor that was even a penny cheaper – cause there are sentiments and then there is business. I get it. And at the same time we are so thankful that you’ve kept on supporting our business, I promise you nobody here is going to forget it — this is why we work so hard for our clients and I can’t wait to show you how we’re going to help next.

Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO
Own Web Now Corp

P.S. Nearly two decades ago I wrote the first version of ExchangeDefender – and in my infinite wisdom and English as a second language, I used “quarantine” as the term for SPAM that I kept out of your inbox. I’m less amused that a global apocalypse has validated the choice of that term.

Corporate Email Archiving: A Must-Have for Business Continuity, and Compliance

The age of information has certainly changed the way in which people from around the world interact and communicate with one another.  Businesses have been the hardest hit in trying to store and manage email communications that are critical to their organization.

A shocking 300+ billion emails are sent per day, with the average office employee receiving a shocking 130+ emails every day. The daily number continues to climb, so the question is: What can organizations do to successfully manage all of this data?

The Answer: Email Archiving for Business

Email Archiving solutions provide a systematic approach to storing email communications, both inbound and outbound email. ExchangeDefender Email Archiving provides encrypted, long-term storage, and email recovery. The solution also helps businesses achieve email compliance which requires organizations to be accountable and transparent by using a proper storage solution for their messages.

10 Reasons to get Email Archiving for your organization today!

1 – Immediate access all emails ever sent and received

2 – Automatic backup of all email communication

3 – Automatic backup of all contacts, calendar items, and other relevant data

4 – Achieve regulatory email compliance for HIPAA, GDPR, SOX, SEC and more

5 – Fast eDiscovery – speedy access to all emails to adhere to requests of information quickly

6 – Corporate email policy – Implementation and Monitoring

7 – Infinite storage of all email communications for 10 years or more

8 – Employee oversight – customize policies that are available organizational-wide to restrict the deleting of critical information

9 – Knowledge management – have oversight of what was sent, by whom, and when.

10 – IT productivity – significantly reduce mail server storage issues, in turn reducing additional server costs

Quickly access information about employee and end user communications with a simple eDiscovery search that can search on average, 10,000 inboxes at once. ExchangeDefender’s Email Archiving system takes all of your emails and stores them in a safe place, multiple times for redundancy. Of course, it is still possible to delete an email, but copies of those emails will be kept within the archiving system, which offers additional space storage to enhance your server capacity.

Keep business emails securely stored, with tamper-proof email archiving. ExchangeDefender Email Archiving provides encrypted, long-term storage, and email recovery.

Learn more about ExchangeDefender’s Email Archiving solution here.