New Service Manager
Our new Service Manager is now live, beta version is running on top of https://support.ownwebnow.com and after a brief period of testing, it will go live across every Shockey Monkey portal. It’s currently running in parallel with our legacy system so it doesn’t matter which one you use.
We’ll be doing a special walkthrough of the new system and discussing all the new features that you will start seeing as the new Shockey Monkey feature set makes it into the overall ExchangeDefender platform:
Service Manager Webinar
Wed, Apr 11, 2018 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT
Click here to register
And since I’m on the subject of webinars… Please come and attend this one too – brand new ExchangeDefender UI (first in probably the last 7 years, rewritten from scratch) is coming this month!
ExchangeDefender 9
Wed, Apr 18, 2018 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT
Click here to register
Hope to see you there.
-Vlad
CEO, ExchangeDefender
How to kill SPAM without using ExchangeDefender
65% of all emails sent are spam, what’s the solution?
At ExchangeDefender we kill SPAM for a living. We spend a ton of time and energy identifying, filtering, and destroying junk mail. If you’ve ever wondered how you could make your email experience better, even without the massive layered security that ExchangeDefender provides, these are the steps you could take today:
1. Configure strict SPF/DKIM DNS records
SPF and DKIM (DMARC) can help you protect your domain name from being used in SPAM mailbombs. Spammers will often use real email addresses and domains to send forged “spoofed” email messages and SPF/DKIM provide a mechanism for identifying which email server/platform you use. By setting up an SPF/DKIM you can tell places that are receiving email from your domain what to do if the message wasn’t actually sent from you. If your inbox is full of email bounces and non-delivery receipts, someone is using your email address to send junk mail and an SPF/DKIM record will practically eliminate bouncebacks.
2. Get rid of generic email aliases
At ExchangeDefender we manually process SPAM complaints from our customers – that’s how we train our system to eliminate messages that otherwise make it through because they are legitimate in every way we can automatically process them. The number one way to get a ton of annoying email that may be on the borderine between legitimate commercial mail and an unsolicited one: generic email aliases. If you get info@, sales@, admin@ or so on, you are painting a giant bullseye on your Inbox and practically begging to be spammed.
3. Unsubscribe from newsletters
I know, I know, everyone that has your email address supports CAN-SPAM , would never send you unsolicited mail, would never sell their client list… and even if you believe all those lies most of the time, people still get hacked. All the time! As do their ISPs and infrastructure along the way. If you want to reduce the amount of junk mail you deal with, simply reduce the number of places that have your email address. Simple!
4. Don’t click on everything in your Inbox
Sometimes SPAM gets through. Sometimes dangerous stuff from your friends and colleagues gets forwarded around. Sometimes your antivirus isn’t up to date. Sometimes the firewall virus protection is misconfigured our expired. Things happen: none are a good excuse for the simplest thing you can do: avoid clicking on anything in messages that look or seem suspicious.
5. Do not blindly whitelist major ISPs
The second biggest source of SPAM complaints at ExchangeDefender is actually completely self-inflicted: people whitelist major email providers and wonder why blatant junk mail keeps on “slipping through” as whitelisted. Go through your whitelist entries in Outlook, etc and make sure you aren’t whitelisting Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Verizon, AT&T, Hotmail or any of the widely used and abused email domains. Spammers know your email admin doesn’t want to deal with complaints about messages you’re getting from these platforms so they treat them more leniently – so spammers simply abuse them.
It’s really that simple – following these steps will cut your junk mail pile in half within a day. If you want to reduce it to less than 1%, ExchangeDefender is here for you for less than a buck a month or you can layer it and add more protection if you need it because time is money: but no amount of technology and automation can replace just a little bit of common sense.
Federal Trade Commission
CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business
The official website of the Federal Trade Commission, protecting America’s consumers for over 100 years.
VIDEO: Live Archive keeps emails up, and running!
So here is something that has always worked for me: everyone hates outages. Regardless of why I’m invited to speak to anyone about ExchangeDefender, and the billion problems we solve, I am here to help you with just one thing: uptime. If things are working, we can sort everything out, but the fear of the new unknown solution causing downtime is the #1 thing your client is thinking about. So address it first.
Posted by ExchangeDefender on Thursday, March 29, 2018
What’s this video about? Live Archive.
So here is something that has always worked for me: everyone hates outages. Regardless of why I’m invited to speak to anyone about ExchangeDefender, and the billion problems we solve, I am here to help you with just one thing: uptime. If things are working, we can sort everything out, but the fear of the new unknown solution causing downtime is the #1 thing your client is thinking about. So address it first.
What is Live Archive?
Access your email via the cloud when outages happen.
Organizations are constantly facing internet and email outages, maintenance cycles and service unavailability. The key to productivity is being able to access your email even when outages happen Exchange Defender LiveArchive Business Continuity is the solution.
As you send and receive email, we make a copy and store it on our network – when you experience an outage you can just pull up a webmail system on your computer, tablet, or phone and continue where you left off.
Visit Exchange Defender: Email Security, Archiving, and Business Continuity solutions
Why is there suddenly a heavy demand for Encryption?
Email encryption is on the rise, ExchangeDefender offers two types of encryption.
What is behind the growth in the adoption of email encryption?
Over the past year we’ve seen an explosion in sales of ExchangeDefender Email Encryption – which is a surprise given that we’ve not only had it for years but that we’ve also given it away for free. HIPAA has been around for over 20 years, dozens of other regulations that almost all companies ignore have been gone for just as long – so why now?
In one word: penalties.
Companies have long known that they can’t operate efficiently without email – and that they cannot just move files around “just to get it to them” once they see the penalties. But selling a service to someone that has avoided using or paying for it is never an easy discussion so here are the 3 quick questions that should lead you to an effective pitch in under 1 minute:
1. Who sends you encrypted messages?
2. Who could get hurt if this information went public?
3. What is your exposure? How much negligence insurance do you have?
The more they mumble, the more of those questions they cannot answer, the more details or costs or scope they don’t understand, the more they need it. End your question with this line: How comfortable would you be having this conversation in a legal deposition?
Grow your business: Positioning ExchangeDefender’s Encryption feature.
Elevator pitch: How to position ExchangeDefender Encryption as an answer to all of the above problems
→It is included in your ExchangeDefender Pro subscription and it’s transparent – no software to install, nothing to manage or configure.
→ You’ll be using the same process and same security major banks, health care providers and lawyers use – so you’ll be protected from most critical security exploits.
→ Finally, it’s dead simple to use – all your employees need to do is put [ENCRYPT] in the subject when they are sending the message. Doesn’t matter if it’s on the phone our Outlook or Outlook Web Access, it just works.
Ding. You’re done. It’s virtually impossible not to sell this service – and it’s desperately needed by anyone using email to do business or conduct confidential discussions. One more thing: Because encryption is transparent and on demand in the cloud, it also protects you when the security issue is on the recipients end – because email is never stored on their PC or device, if someone hacks their network they won’t be able to get to the info stored in your encrypted message!
If email is a business necessity then email encryption is it’s insurance policy.
If you discuss business over email, then anything confidential that should be in that email should be a matter of employee communication protocol: If you attach something sensitive to this message, you better encrypt it and CYA. This is the way things go at banks, with lawyers, with accountants, with realtors and at nearly every white collar job: Nobody wants to assume the liability so they’ll all do what it takes to protect the data.
And with high profile hacks and compromises in the news daily, is not having it worth risking the whole company?
XD Service Manager Beta Release
We are very excited to announce the launch of the new XD Service Manager that will allow our partners and their clients a much friendlier way to manage their Exchange services. This is a complete rewrite of the code – frontend and backend – and we’ve taken all the feedback and made the beast much friendlier both for smaller accounts as well as for enterprise clients with tons of users to manage directly. The goal was to entirely remove the IT department and “the PowerShell guy” from the equation and put power user tools at your disposal to quickly and effectively make changes on the mass scale.
But first, the frontend – full rewrite – with new responsive UI and controls. Previous jQuery UI that has been hacked, tweaked and kicked along for years is being replaced by this UI that will work as well on the desktop as it does on any mobile device:
Navigation is in line with typical modern design you’ve seen in many other web applications with ability to filter, scope, search and quickly apply changes to multiple accounts.
Actions are context-based, meaning you will not be refreshing the entire page in order to get search results or do quick changes on multiple accounts. We’ve fully extended the Exchange feature set in the new UI giving you the ability to centrally manage all aspects of your Exchange service without having to go back and forth between different screens or modules (so in that regard, it’s even easier to deal with than an Exchange management console)
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the new service is very end-user friendly. While 90% of the feature requests for the new service manager came from our power users that expressed a lot of frustration with the speed and accessibility of the portal, we needed to recognize the reality of who manages IT in 2018 – it’s no longer the IT guy or the IT department – users want to be able to take control of their public folders, distribution groups, forwarding, password resets and so on – so our design had to take that into account as well:
As you can tell, the new Service Manager is far friendlier and uses the same wizard approach in the end-user mode that they are likely very familiar with. Because we’ve done very strict implementation on the backend (with all the regulations we are now responsible for), it’s virtually impossible for them to make a mistake. Unfortunately for some of our unskilled IT folks this means no more “Password1” or “NoSPAM” or “Princess1!” as a password going forward but everyone will be experiencing far fewer problems as a result of it.
Better reporting as well – you’ll be able to get the full overview of configuration, who uses what, where they are at and so on.
The new Service Manager goes into Beta next week (last week of March 2018) and will run in parallel with the existing Service Manager (on the same site as https://support.ownwebnow.com) as we get more feedback from our entire user base – so don’t worry about this springing up on you as a surprise. You will see the new link on the Dashboard and will have the ability to access the new infrastructure from there. Both will continue to work for at least a month.
This is also the new UI framework for Shockey Monkey: which we have been working on for a year now. The same infrastructure, MVC, UI and upgraded backend are going to be driving ExchangeDefender, SM, XD and all other services which means that you’ll very soon be managing everything from the same look and feel that will be extended to your site as well. What it ultimately means is that the new UI will follow your branding and your color schemes and no matter where in the ExchangeDefender universe your client ends up, they will be dealing directly with your brand.
And we’ll be there in a live chat to provide support and help them out with every service.
Thereby ultimately managing the entire communications, collaboration and business management platform end-to-end. Very exciting times ahead!
-Vlad
CEO, ExchangeDefender
Attachment download: New Service Manager Partner Guide (pdf).
Do’s and Don’ts: Selling your clients on Email Security Solutions
Learn more about the do’s and don’ts when selling security solutions
Let’s face it, most IT solutions in the business process fail because users don’t use them. They don’t use them because they see it as another unnecessary time waster in the process they are already accustomed to and count on everything being yet another thing management will soon forget about because they don’t work the same issues all day long. Sound familiar? All the new, cool, better, smarter ways of doing something will always lose to users unwillingness and inability to change. Until someone loses their job or the company gets sued for negligence. Oops!
So, what should you be talking about with your clients?
1. Don’t talk about backups – talk about long term email archiving and ediscovery.
2. Don’t talk about encryption – talk about safely getting data over without getting hacked.
3. Don’t talk about SPAM – talk about fake senders, fake links
4. Don’t talk about Phishing – talk about identity theft, compromised passwords and bank accounts.
5. Don’t talk about Compliance – talk about setting business standards and avoiding lawsuits.
6. Don’t talk about Web File Sharing – ask how they get important documents to their clients or vendors?
7. Don’t talk about Malware – ask them what they currently do to protect their staff from taking down the whole office.
Your clients have been hearing about SPAM and Virus protection for over a decades now, they view it the same way they view every other software license cost – part of doing business. The problem in 2018 is that it’s no longer just the technology complexity dictating business spending, regulatory bodies and government are getting involved in it too. Nearly every industry is subject to some new regulation, record keeping process, security audit, assessment or other “time waster” that they will have to deal with. So start clipping news articles and send them headlines with the message “We really need to set you up with ExchangeDefender so you don’t end up in the next article” – and I don’t mean it in a sarcastic or fear mongering way at all, nearly a quarter of my office time goes to time travel discussions and things businesses wished they had in place before they got in trouble. Talk to them now.
The Bottom Line:
Businesses you are trying to sell technical solutions to are already dealing with a lot of nightmares related to technology. They don’t want another thing to manage, report, customize, tweak and learn: they want something that reduces all of that work. That something is ExchangeDefender, all-in-one, end-user friendly email solution that removes things they don’t need to look at and makes stuff they are looking for easy to find.
I encourage you to talk to your clients less from a technical solution standpoint and more from the business process implementation. Yes, they may trust you because of your technical expertise but what you need them to understand (and what will ultimately earn you the business) is which business issues are going to be addressed by spending a few dollars a month. If they can identify with the problem, they will pay for it to go away because everyone is always trying to reduce costs and labor is the biggest one of them all. Help make them more productive.
2018 Best Sellers: ExchangeDefender Email Security Features
We’re almost done with the first quarter and I wanted to take a moment to brief you about the features that are driving sales the most. These figures were taken from the top 10% of our managed services partners (MSP) in the small and mid-market segment (so they aren’t skewed by distributors, ISVs and large government/enterprise orders). I want to give you an idea about what is selling out there and hopefully these are the same conversations you’re having (or should be having) in order to grow your business.
70% of our MSP’s say these email security features are making them money in 2018.
.
Compliance Archiving
In Compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC, PCI regulations.
We are continuing to see a massive shift from email backups to email Compliance Archiving. In a nutshell, our Compliance Archiving offers companies the ability to store up to 10 years of inbound, outbound, and interoffice email in the cloud where it meets dozens of regulator compliance, government and eDiscovery standards. Not only does it eliminate the pain point of managing backups, but it enables users to quickly and easily locate messages they are looking for on their own.
SPAM Filtering
Spam accounts for 14.5 billion messages globally per day. In other words, spam makes up 45% of all emails.
The more people move from their Exchange servers to the cloud (and Office 365) the more they realize how good they had it while their security was layered by their MSP managed solution. While everyone goes to the cloud hoping that “it’s good enough” SPAM filtering will work, companies quickly find out that the few bucks a month they were spending to keep trash out of the mailbox was really worth it. I have spoken to so many MSPs that couldn’t convince their clients to keep ExchangeDefender as they went to the cloud and that within a week of making a move to Office 365 they were right back on it – some unfortunately due to immediately failing an audit and phishing stuff flying through (more details on Phishing Protection and how to promote it later)
Encryption
Encryption use is no longer optional.
As we pick up the pace on the rollout of our Compliance Manager service, we are seeing a lot of sales made on the back of Encryption (free) and Corporate Encryption (addon) services. I’ll admit I have not spoken to a ton of people about it, but feedback we continuously get about the service is that regulatory requirements in several industries are finally starting to be taken seriously: health care, banking, mortgage/finance, CPA, and sales activity is typically the highest during Q1 and it’s also the time those industries go over their business process and direct their staff to use new services. Every time someone uses the encryption process in ExchangeDefender we seem to get more interest for the product from the third party that received the message so if you’re not promoting it, you’re missing out on real world demand.
Our top email security solutions offer must-have features for any business.
As I mentioned in the introduction, these are the services that are in demand now – so if they aren’t front and center in your promotional collateral you should be talking to our marketing team (!!! Action Item). Remember that companies will not pay for a service that is nice to have or even one they are required to have – they’ll only pay for things that either grow the business or reduce problems and make workers more productive and profitable. SPAM filtering makes people more productive while encryption and compliance archiving make problems related to backups and lawsuits go away. Since these features are part of a service every single user interacts with daily, they aren’t like to want to cancel it, giving you the opportunity for a long-term revenue generator.
Interested in Becoming a Partner? Or simply want to learn more about ExchangeDefender’s leading email security solutions? Either way, We’ve got you covered.
ExchangeDefender Address Book Lockdowns
Effective March 1st, ExchangeDefender will only allow delivery to email addresses that exist in our Service Manager or ExchangeDefender Admin Portal. This is a non-event for 99.999% of our clients (it’s only being mentioned because it’s a refresh of the AUP/TOS policy) and it is intended as a security precaution against threats we’re seeing in the wild and on our honeypot networks.
The Problem
ExchangeDefender as an SMTP proxy will scan and deliver any email targeted at a protected domain. Even though we sanitize each message and do not permit dangerous content through, if the email address does not exist on the clients server, the message will bounce to the sender. Now, imagine that sender doesn’t have an SPF/DMARC, and imagine that the address itself is spoofed – now send that message a few thousand times and an attacker can destroy a mailbox simply by overloading with non-delivery receipts and bounce messages.
Why this happened in the first place
Bad automation. It happens, and when it happens on a scale of ExchangeDefender, it creates an issue. So to minimize complaints, we just stopped actively enforcing address book validation. To those of you protecting servers on networks outside of ExchangeDefender’s control (think Google, Office 365, etc) the management and addition of new addresses will become automatic. Here is a peak at our new support portal. It should make a lot of you very happy.
Figure 1: Service Manager. Instead of having a ton of accounts in the listing, everything is now logically grouped by a Company. This way whenever you go to manage one client you only see the users belonging to that client and any addition or modification will pull pricing, configuration and meta data from that organization’s settings. This should virtually eliminate mistakes, billing issues and configuration problems.
Figure 2: Adding a new mailbox. The process is streamlined, clean and remarkably simple. The reality is that IT departments are no longer in charge of this anyhow, neither are our MSP partners. Businesses want the ability to control memberships, configurations, distribution lists, permissions and everything in between.
Figure 3: Mailbox permissions, settings, etc. There are several screens for this but needless to say we’re looking to expose a lot of the features that can be managed granularly in a way that businesses expect them to. Let’s face it, your average office manager dealing with the new hire isn’t about to fire up remote PowerShell; Strong passwords, additional features, granular control, public folder and distribution group membership templates, etc are all coming soon.
Other really cool stuff is coming very soon as well, we’re pretty excited with what we’re building and delivering… but the focus for us always remains on the security and safe communication – and everything that supports it goes hand in hand.
ExchangeDefender Account Lockouts
We live in interesting times. With over 1.4 billion compromised accounts and users relying on the same password for every site, it’s nearly impossible to secure users that don’t want to set strong passwords. Nevertheless, that’s what you pay us for and we’re doing our best.
Until the new Service Manager is in and automatic service policies with full compliance are added in, we’ve been forced to institute lockouts on accounts that are being compromised or have suspicious activity. Unfortunately, when an attack on a mailbox is launched it doesn’t come from one IP address, it comes from hundreds, and blocking them is impossible.
But locking the account and making the client change the password to something that isn’t on the dark web.. that’s simpler. This is something that absolutely has to get done, if the account is used for spamming purposes it can blacklist that address, domain or worse.
If your account gets locked out due to a security compromise, you can now unlock them and restore service automatically.
Just go to the Service Manager, find the user, reset the password and you should be all set.
P.S. In the event that you aren’t regularly changing your clients passwords, or you have ridiculously simple ones, we need to talk. Part of the issue is that your clients, regardless of size location or industry, are just SPAM zombies waiting to happen if you don’t set long and complex passwords that aren’t used anywhere else. If you don’t want to do that, we need to talk about two factor authentication. ExchangeDefender network has never been compromised – but individual accounts get popped all the time and it’s generally with a password that is well known and available in a simple Google search.
Client Support – Can’t someone else do it?
On February 1st, ExchangeDefender will officially start providing end user support for all email issues related to our platform. For our many partners and resellers this means that we will, under your name and brand, take and place calls and help your clients solve email problems. At no additional cost, across our entire Pro line of services: ExchangeDefender Pro, Exchange Pro, Compliance, and Encryption.
It just makes sense. Our entire service lifecycle is structured around ITIL, integrates into our partners support infrastructure seamlessly, is covered by our SOC1 and SOC2 audits, comes with advanced reporting, security/id, session and call recording… and a lot more that we cannot publicly disclose. But if you join me:
Wednesday, February 7th, Noon Eastern
Click here for the NDA & Instructions
This is going to be one of the denser webinars we’ve ever put together and the audience includes everyone from management down to helpdesk – what I have on deck is a layout of our service model, our scope, our escalation policies, our compliance protocol, authentication and validation service, etc. Consistency in this service is key so winging it or improvising isn’t an option.
-Vlad
P.S. I encourage you to check this thing out live. If you think this will be a service you offer down the road, this webinar (minus the Q&A) will be required viewing and the software will track attentiveness so if you even mildly care, I’d tune in or make someone at the office watch it.