2007 End of Life, Almost…
Exchange 2007 is beyond the Standard support life cycle of Microsoft. With that in mind, we have to ensure that we continue to support the most redundant and supported platform(s) we can. Continuing to provide Exchange 2007 has been more of a courtesy to not put the burden of migrations on our partners because that’s something we always pride ourselves in. If we can avoid costing you time, we will, every time.
However, as we saw with Australia the 2007 technology just does not offer the level of redundancy we like to provide to our clients, so we have to make some changes to ensure that we’re providing the redundancy you and your clients deserve. As such, we’ll be migrating all users off of Scrooge, Huey, Dewey, and Europe. We will be providing an opportunity to remain on 2007 on Dewey in an as is format. We’ll support it, but the recovery process due to an outage is not going to resemble what we can offer on the 2010 clusters.
If you have clients that need to remain on 2007 please reach out to me or my team within the support portal so we can start keeping a record of exclusions. Unless you’re on DEWEY and want 2007 you’ll be migrating.
We are going to make the migration process as easy as we can. So far we have have it down to (if you have an autodiscover record) all you have to do is click “Repair” within outlook and run a tool we’ll provide and that’s it so this shouldn’t be an earth shattering process cost producing process.
Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737
Customer Service & Loyalty
If you own a business, I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the objective of your company is to make money. To do so, you must focus in on a majority of factors. One of which, is providing customers with satisfaction. Creating customer satisfaction with your base is the first step to making those customers loyal to your company. If you browse a bookstore long enough, you can find no less than hundred “how-to” books on customer satisfaction. This is because the authors of these books understand one key foundation in every business: Without customers, you have no business! With that said, there are simple pieces of advice that may seem trivial, but nevertheless, are the keystones to providing great customer satisfaction:
Be Nice
Listen to the Customer
Be Empathic to Customer Issues
Present Solutions to the Customer
This list may sound like common sense to you, but most of these items are neglected and are the top four complaints of customers. Good customer service is essentially a variation on the golden rule: Treat others as you want to be treated. If people believe that they’re being remembered and are recognized by the business, this will have a positive impact on the way they feel toward your business.
So why is this important to marketing? Because it is well known that it is five times more profitable to spend your marketing dollars to retain the customers that you have than to use the dollars to beat the bushes for new customers. Marketing to loyal customers makes selling your new ideas, services, and products much easier than if you had to obtain new business. This is one of the main reasons we closed down our Partner Program to new business. We wanted to concentrate of our partners who have been with us for a very long time. This is not to say that you should never expand your customer base, just remember who brought you to the dance in the first place.
The way companies can cultivate a strong customer relationship is simple: Keep in touch with the customer! Too many times, businesses do not take advantage of information provided by their customer base. This information can consist of email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, etc. These are customers who have had a great experience in the past shopping with your business, and no one ever contacts them again. One of the most common phrases around our office is: ‘Pick up the phone and give the guy a call.’ Maintain a strong communication with your customer base. Let them know what your company is planning for the future. Let customers in on special sneak peak offers, future products, or ideas that are in the pipeline. Get them excited!
Michael D. Alligood
Partner Sales & Support, ExchangeDefender & Shockey Monkey
michael@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x707
Becoming Your Own Financing Engine
As a pioneer and proponent in the hardware as a Service (HaaS) game for many years, one thing that was very apparent to me was the sheer profitability and revenue that can be generated from financing. In HaaS, the biggest problem is the amount of capitol it takes to provide that financing and the risks can be quite high.
The expectation in the model is to have a high enough percentage of interest to offset any potential failures, while still providing a hefty amount of profit. This model worked well as the HaaS vendor, but sometimes left very little, if any profit for the MSP if a deal went south. This could often times leave MSP’s holding the bag and responsible for the debt created.
Since the peak and slow decline of hardware sales, the MSP landscape has changed quite a bit. With cloud, services, installation, and support becoming more prevalent, the opportunity to revisit in-house financing has never been more apparent.
No different than the way we sold solutions in the HaaS game, the real value for the customer is bundling all needed components into a single payment option. This should include needed cloud products, services, all installation, as well as future support. By bundling the entire solution into a manageable payment, customers are more willing to sign termed or multiyear contracts, providing you a stream of recurring revenue to the business.
Most cloud solutions are subscription models, which takes much of the burden off the solution provider where financing is concerned. This leaves installation and support as the responsibility of the MSP. A good rule of thumb in calculating what to add to your bundled price is to take any costs you have a dividing them by a number. First determine your term, 12 months, 24months, or 36 months. Once you have this determine your comfortable payback, this can be anywhere between 6 and 24months depending on your contract term and comfort level. The equation should look something like this…
Add this determined number to any marked up subscriptions to determine your total customer monthly payment. In the above example you will break even at month 10. From there it is all profit. The same equation can be used for any hardware needs such as firewalls or BDR devices. It is a good idea to get a down payment at the time of signing a deal. Many MSP’s ask for a down payment equal to one month’s total payment but this can be anything you would like.
Becoming your own financing engine can be highly profitable and can help you close more deals. Make sure to consult with your accountant about any tax implications or requirements before providing any in-house financing.
Frank Gurnee
VP, Channel Services, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x4777
frank@ownwebnow.com
Breaking Business Rules
By definition, behavior is the actions or reactions of a person or animal in response to external or internal stimuli. Behavior is both innate and learned. This is why individuals can function is a civilized society while remain unique at the same time. Learned behavior comes as a result of experience. When an individual encounters an external or internal stimulus; the innate behavior is many times trumped by learned behavior—such as following rules.
The behavior that controls whether or not we follow or break rules greatly depends on the stimuli. If the stimulus is greater than the rule, we break the rule. There are times when rules outlived their usefulness. Or it may be that the end result outweighs the need to follow a rule that stifles progress. Although the majority may frown upon rule breaking, without such behavior the business environment (and humanity) would not progress.
Recently, I read an article titled, “Breaking the Rules” by Paul Sloane, author and founder of Destination-Innovation. In this article, he describes how businesses operate with boundaries and restrictions that are self-imposed and accepted without questioning. He further describes that often it is the newcomer to an industry who can ask the question, “What would happen if we broke the rules?” Mr. Sloane gives examples of companies such as Swatch, Virgin Atlantic, and Oticon who rewrote the rules of their respected industries to gain a competitive edge over their competition. Furthermore, Sloane touches on how Picasso broke the rules on what a face should look like and how Gaudi broke the rules on what buildings should look like.
In many ways, rule breaking allows companies to stand out from the competition, and innovate products and services, and make themselves endearing. Think Apple—pun intended. However, companies need to have its share of balance. Too much rule breaking can be worse than complete obedience to the norms. Let me be clear, I am not referring to moral, ethical, or legal rules; but to business rules only. You may need to examine your own business rules to determine if such rules are slowing productivity or halting it altogether.
Michael D. Alligood
Partner Sales & Support, ExchangeDefender & Shockey Monkey
michael@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x707
Spring Forward: Shockey Monkey
Yesterday we held our huge ExchangeDefender Spring webinar – thank you for the record attendance. If you missed it don’t worry, the recording is available here and all our webinars are available at the ExchangeDefender Social site.
But let’s talk about one of the highlights from our presentation yesterday.. Shockey Monkey.
We have spent an insane amount of time improving the product and have completely rewritten certain sections that have the “web app” behave like an actual desktop application. First of all, we have a lot of new eye candy and new themes that elegantly blend in all the elements of the UI.
As far as the UI goes, things are several times faster than they were before.
Additionally, we have some really cool transitions in place when you go from one module to another that give the browser a chance to catch up and render the page before displaying elements. As stuff gets loaded it fades into view and removes the old-school jumbled look.
We have redesigned the dashboard to focus on what is important. Your announcements on the left and your agenda, schedule, tickets and tasks on the right. Instead of crowding the dashboard and making you dizzy with charts, you start with what is important and everything is just a click away. All the elements can be quickly touched, modified and updated – allowing you to slice through your daily agenda without having to go back and forth just to get started with your day.
Speaking of your day.. we have a beautiful and powerful new calendar function that is in my humble opinion better than anything else out there – spanking even Outlook. My whole team is right there, all the appointments are dynamic and everything integrates with Exchange on the backend so all our iPhones, iPads, Outlook and even Android are completely in sync no matter where we are.
The dispatch center has taken a massive step forward while remaining simple and easy to use. Just assign the ticket to someone and then drop it on their calendar. Done.
Speaking of support, we are helping you organize that better. As we get more and more different businesses powering their operations with Shockey Monkey, the need to keep multiple service boards is there. As an IT company we used to only handle support tickets but then as other departments joined in the fun we started breaking out product boards, service boards, project boards.. even an internal service board just for staff to deal with me.
We have had a lot of customization requests to the look and feel of the service board ticket listing. Ton of it. But most of it is difficult to categorize and keep the level of simplicity in our setup… so everything you wish is being added and we are putting some more quirky features under the Experimental / Custom Features section of the setup and you can tweak the portal to your own content without making it complex at all.
For example, our advanced settings now allow you to highlight tickets that are assigned to you, stop your clients from being able to close tickets (if you keep them open for review or billing purposes) include ticket number in the ticket listing as well as who the ticket is assigned to.
Speaking of better organization… the key is to keep everything in Shockey Monkey. But what is the point of keeping it all in one place if you can’t find it? Well, Shockey Monkey now centralizes and filters your search results. So if you search for Vlad it will show you all the tickets, services, subscriptions, knowledge base articles – everything – in an easy to categorize and locate way. Not a huge meaningless list of contacts jumbled with companies and services if you know that you’re just looking for a knowledge base article.
Of course, ExchangeDefender Unicorn is now live and embedded into the product for all our partners. Yes, still free!
It’s gotten more powerful as well, supporting event templates, alert templates, escalation, workflows and remote desktop access.
Now while these features are great and tons of you have been asking for them… they are nothing compared to the biggest enhancement we have – a brand new Business/Corporate module.
It solves a need that no other solution out there has and it is uniquely small business.
Our employee portal allows employees and employers to manage goals, expectations, time off, time sheets, education, hardware that is being issued and far more.
For example, instead of dealing with employee reviews as an annual chore, you now have a way to create an ongoing automated way to set goals, track accomplishments and make career progress a part of the game.
You can also track all of employees education, certifications, licenses, titles or degrees.
Your employees can easily submit for time off and automatically land on the calendar upon approval.
Likewise, timesheets are automated and accountable – we tie in our checkin punchclock to keep the employees accountable for when they show up and when they leave and assure they report accurate time. Employers also have a way to see who is putting in more than they are expected to and that leads to rewards 
Finally..
The biggest pain that nobody seems to manage well is the people we pay – our vendors.
We all do a great job of helping our clients and tracking our interaction with them because that is what we are paid to do. But shouldn’t we be doing an even better job – providing a more prudent process – making sure we get the most out of the $ we pay our vendors? Without tracking, notes and an audit process you just don’t know.
Say hello to Shockey Monkey’s vendor section.
Track passwords, resources, notes, vendor personnel, web sites, youtube training videos, howto documents, forum threads with fixes and workarounds, links to download sites, training collateral login information. You name it.. then track it. In a centralized environment.
Shockey Monkey is all about small business. From IT to far and beyond IT, the product we have designed and delivered is running our partners businesses and is now branching out to provide reporting, recording and accountability to new industries. If you’d like to partner with us and deploy Shockey Monkey for businesses we would love to talk to you!
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO, ExchangeDefender
vlad@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x500
Chasing a Sale…
One of the hardest things for some people to do, especially tech minded individuals in the IT industry, is chase a sale. This single action can define an organization as a sales oriented company or tech oriented company.
Not that the two can not co-exist but the nature of chasing a sale brings an advantage that pure tech minded companies don’t possess. In the sales world chasers are called hunters, and account managers or people who wait for sales to come to them are called gatherers or farmers.
Generally tech companies without sales staff fall in the gatherer or farmer category. The phone rings an appointment is made, someone walks in with a problem a sale is made; you get the picture. Hunters or better yet chasers find opportunities and then chase the sale until either they close the deal or are told no. Even then a good chaser will make sure to reach out to a “no” client periodically to see if there is a change in status.
This is the major difference. Chasers are defined by the relentless nature to never give up, to never take no for an answer, and to continually follow up. It would be a lot for me to ask tech minded individuals or non-sales people to try to adopt these traits. The reality is that this can’t be expected as it is not in the majority of tech individual’s personalities to work this way. Of course that’s ok because without the techs there would be nothing to sell.
However, there are things that can be applied to a non-sales organization that can create that advantage that we talked about. The biggest one being follow up. You may be surprised to learn that most sales are lost immediately following the initial meeting. This is completely based on the inability or lack of immediacy and follow up.
Now you may think this sounds funny but think about a time in your past where you just did not get back to a potential client, you never provided a proposal, or you simply forgot. Don’t worry it has happened to all of us, and even seasoned sales professionals miss opportunities based on the lack of follow up.
One way to “keep it tech” while creating immediacy and follow up is to provide a simple thank you email when you get back to the office from an appointment. This lets the potential client know that you are diligently working on their proposal and provides you an open line of communication.
Once you have sent this initial email set a number of reminders in your calendar to reach out and follow up with the potential client. Though these reminders are easy to dismiss or overlook at least they will be keeping you on track. The better you can become at follow up the more sales you will close.
Chasing a sale doesn’t mean you are annoying the potential client and actually can be a very positive experience for both you and the client. Potential clients appreciate the communication, just don’t overdo it, and always provide them with anything you have promised, on time.
Frank Gurnee
VP, Channel Services, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x4777
frank@ownwebnow.com
ExchangeDefender & Shockey Monkey Spring Webinar
Remember all the doom and gloom predictions about how the cloud was going to put all the IT people out of work? Boy did it! The carnage brought on by cloud services has taken names like Dell and HP to all time lows, and has sparked rumors and reality of privatization. Yet, every partner I talk to is posting their best year ever, and is more excited about their opportunities going forward, even with the lackluster economy.
Success is not by accident. In our fast paced industry, success is a factor of the right tools, the right timing and the right partnerships – please read this newsletter, study it and call us. We want to help. The days of “selling” and thick gear margins are largely gone – clients are smarter, better informed, and more selective, but like all of us they are also busier and they want someone to handle the explosion of vendors they rely on for the modern workplace. Yes the technology is easier to consume but there is more of it and more ways to profit from managing it so the client doesn’t have to.
With that in mind, I would like to invite you to our Roadmap webinar next week. In this webinar we will discuss everything that we are working on and the things we see happening over the next 12-16 months.
Thursday, March 7th 2-3 PM EST
As with all our webinars this one will be recorded and available for download in the Webinar section of our web site.
Growth Continues
As some of you may remember, our hardware upgrade cycle began around Thanksgiving last year, and is scheduled to be complete in March. During that time, we have completely eliminated RAID from our Exchange environments, improved backup and redundancy worldwide, and bulked up our ExchangeDefender infrastructure for the growth we anticipate this year.
It has not been all good news (we had a Dell RAID failure in the middle of a migration affecting nearly 400 mailboxes), and our antispam detection efficiency slipped slightly due to the overtime put in on network management and growth. The good news though has been better than I ever expected. We now feature data center redundancy in all geographies we provide Exchange in, all of our Exchange 2010 systems feature 3-way redundancy through local copies/DAG, we provide clustered failover infrastructure with a lagged copy of all databases, as well we also provide a copy of those databases in a different data center. Our compliance products and LocalCloud have grown exponentially in 2012 allowing us to invest even more in gear and reduce your storage pricing. The scale and reliability that we are now able to offer is frankly unparalleled in the industry.
I know that maintenance, migrations, updates and upgrades are not fun nor easy to explain that it can take longer than a month to complete – those are the challenges of complexity and the massive scale that we work on. However, that scale is precisely why our platform is so reliable and why so many of you can leverage it to win competitively in the marketplace and not worry about servers, RAID controllers, patches and backups.
Specifically, our ExchangeDefender inbound nodes have 60% more capacity today than they did at Thanksgiving. Europe and Australia Exchange clusters now have data center redundancy. Louie, our Exchange cluster, is now on the same spec as our Rockerduck cluster – both with 3 layers of protection, both with data center redundancy. It’s not cheap but it’s cheaper than downtime and losing business – something I hope you remind your clients of when they get price sensitive about the solutions you provide.
New Stuff
Shockey Monkey is getting an upgrade next week, this update includes the new business management section, upgraded support area with private boards, new calendar / scheduling / dispatch center and an upgraded UI that is a few times faster than it was in the past. We are thrilled about this product and hope you consider joining over 100 partners that are currently selling Shockey Monkey to their small businesses clients.
Looks Cloudy, a site we sponsor and contribute to, is accepting nominations for the Channel Choice Awards in an attempt to recognize people that have helped advance our SMB tech industry. If you have a colleague, boss, partner that you would like to nominate please take a moment to get them the recognition they deserve.
We have a brand new billing system. This addition to Shockey Monkey has allowed us to automate the whole ordering, billing and collections system and consolidate entire months worth of billing updates and adjustments into a half day review process.
Finally, the most important development at ExchangeDefender that I need to let you know about: We hear you when it comes to training. Next month we will announce a new training program offered exclusively by us, over the web, live. The cost of travel, hotels, conference fees and most importantly – time away from the office – is leaving many of you and your staff away from the information that you need to succeed. I don’t mean training in a sense of a half-wailed sales presentation with minor educational content but a full schedule that you or your employees can sit down and benefit from immediately. Tune in to the webinar next week to learn more about this, we are very excited to be able to help you grow beyond our services.
Promotions
Feeling Lucky???? We are currently running a St. Patrick’s Day promotion!! For the entire month of March we will be offering Compliance Archiving for 50% off! Please take advantage of this great promotion. The promotion will be valid on any new account that is signed up within the promotional period. The promotional period for this offering will be March 1st – March 31st. So don’t hesitate! Simply use the coupon code that is located on the postcard that you will receive in the mail or email stephanie@ownwebnow.com to receive the code. If you have any questions just let us know!
Events
In the month of March we will be attending 3 events! Join us in our hometown of Orlando, FL for the XChange Solution Providers event! Then we will be headed up to Chicago, IL for the CompTIA Annual Member Meeting. Then we will be headed to Tampa, FL for the ASCII Success Summit! Stop by, visit us, and say hello, we will be giving away lots of prizes and promotions! We hope to see you on the road!
Feeling Lucky?
Feeling Lucky????
We are currently running a St. Patrick’s Day promotion!! For the entire month of March we will be offering Compliance Archiving for 50% off! Please take advantage of this great promotion. The promotion will be valid on any new account that is signed up within the promotional period. The promotional period for this offering will be March 1st – March 31st. So don’t hesitate! Simply use the coupon code that is located on the postcard that you will receive in the mail or email me to receive the code. If you have any questions just let us know!
Stephanie Hasenour
VP Marketing, ExchangeDefender
stephanie@ownwebnow.com
How to Build a Sales Team
Hiring salespeople can be one of the toughest endeavors for IT company owners, though a necessary part of growing a business. The process of hiring and the ultimate firing of salespeople can leave owners jaded and hold them back from investing or taking a chance on future salespeople. It is important to look for certain characteristics and demands that will provide red flags as well as look for indicators that speak to a good salesperson investment.
Homegrown Salespeople
The easiest way to hire a salesperson is to promote from within. There are a number of indicators that can speak to a natural talent within your organization. You may notice a person on your team that fits certain characteristics. 
Customer-Oriented
Commanding Personality
Task Driven
Less Detail-Oriented
These tend to be good indicators of the type of personality that fits a good salesperson. The best thing about promoting from within is that you tend to have the potential for a longer-term employee. It is important to take the proper steps to verify the chosen candidate is a good fit by utilizing several tests.
The first test is the TTI DISC Behaviors Test. DISC stands for Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance. This test will show the basic behavior types of the candidates that you choose. These behaviors are important to know as the basic fundamentals of personality come in to play when hiring the right person. An example is a person that is more dominant and influential is a better fit in a sales role than a person that is more steady and compliant.
The second test, also by TTI is the Sales Skills Index. This test, though more advanced, gives an overall indication of how a salesperson stacks up against other top performing salespeople. This should be used in scenarios where you are looking at outside candidates for the position. If you are interviewing candidates and have chosen some to move to the next stage of potential hiring, this test can weed out the ones who are truly performers, and the ones that are just good at performing in an interview.
If you find a good internal candidate, the next step is to get them trained. Start by gathering a couple books for them to read and master. Start with “The Little Red Book of Selling” by Jeffery Gitomer, “Questions Based Selling” by Thomas Freese, and just about anything by Zig Ziglar. These will be good introductions into the ins and outs of selling.
Books only go so far though and generally will not convert someone into a salesperson. For that you will need off or onsite training from a professional group, organization, or consultant. This is where the real investment comes in, but it is an absolute requirement to take an employee to the next level. These groups will help provide the basic fundamentals, deep dive into techniques, and provide role-play scenarios that can help mold a person into a sales role. Most good sales book companies have training workshops and certain IT conferences provide sales-based training at their events. The key is researching each of these, contacting peers to find success stories, and evaluating each to find the best type of training for your budget.
Another one of the tough parts for business owners is structuring a salesperson’s compensation plan. Overcomplicating a commission and compensation plan can mean lots of work for you as the owner or for accounting personnel, as well leaves lots of room for costly mistakes. Obviously each structure is based around your companies product and service set and will reflect your margins and revenues.
Most training organizations can help with compensation plans and this is another area to reach out to your peers. Look for other successful industry business owners and ask if they will share their compensation plan with you. Most non-competing business owners would be happy to share their information.
Hiring a salesperson is a difficult and time consuming endeavor but it is a necessary part of growing your business. Take the time and do it right and you will be building a foundation for a great and profitable team. Know ahead of time that there will be failures and those failures will have costs. Do not let these discourage you as it only takes one great salesperson to help springboard your revenues. Do your best to recognize talent from within your organization. Some of the best salespeople I have seen were plucked out of other roles internally, trained, and found new life long careers. Most of all don’t wait! The longer you wait to grow your business through sales, the more opportunity you are giving competitors to grow their businesses.
Frank Gurnee
VP, Channel Services, ExchangeDefender
(877) 546-0316 x4777
frank@ownwebnow.com
How our SPAM detection systems work
ExchangeDefender SPAM protection is a layered process that includes many components which together determine if a message is SPAM or not. While there are too many layers to list and the combination of what we use changes on an hourly basis, we wanted to share some detail of how our process works so you can understand it and explain it if necessary.
RBL – We use several free, commercial and our proprietary realtime blacklists that contain IP addresses of known spammers. These IP addresses typically belong to dialup, cable and DSL/fiber client addresses that shouldn’t be running a mail server, compromised/infected mail servers, unused IP ranges, compromised workstations and devices. These IP addresses account for a bulk of all SPAM mail and most of them will never even make it inside of the ExchangeDefender network.
Reputation blacklist – We use commercial and our proprietary reputation blacklists that indicate how trustworthy the IP address is – have they sent us a lot of SPAM in the past? Are they suddenly sending us hundreds of thousands of messages if they only accounted for 10 in the past month? Do they have legitimate DNS, reverse DNS.
URL blacklist – We use several commercial and our proprietary URL blacklists that identify web site addresses used in previously confirmed SPAM. If you’ve ever received a SPAM message you know that it had an external image or a link to a web site: we look at all web site links in an email and compare it to a list of known SPAM site targets.
Distributed checksums – We use several commercial and proprietary statistics models (warehouses) to determine the likelyhood of bulk mail. Because the only way spammers can distribute mail efficiently is through massive blasts, nearly all message bodies are identical. Each message has a unique signature (an MD5 checksum) that can be compared with other messages and when identical checksums are found it’s more likely that bulk mail is being sent.
Proprietary header checks – We use proprietary header and message checks to determine if the message is a part of an existing conversation between a third party and our own client. We also check if messages have been spoofed or if they have made their way through several gateways, if the language in the message does not match the language of the machine it was sent from, etc.
SPAM keyword and heuristic checks – We use a wide array of SPAM characteristic checks that take into the account the size of the message, subjects, fonts and images. For example, legitimate email typically doesn’t come without a subject or a subject that contains a lot of special characters, it doesn’t come without a persons name in the From line or other “weird stuff”. The “weird stuff” category is so wide and so contextual that it takes most of the time to process.
Now that you are familiar with some of our processes you’re probably getting the idea that SPAM filtering is very similar to the way virus scanning works – we use patterns from known SPAM messages and existing spammers to build a statistical model that tells us if a message is SPAM or not. It also explains why certain messages are delivered instantly while others may take up to a minute or longer to process (delayed header checks, suspicious web site in the email, conversation thread checks, temporary DNS failures or large attachments that require scanning)
We build most of our proprietary infrastructure based on your feedback – we look at the pattern of messages that you release which builds a model that adjusts scores along the way specifically for you – if you release a TON of messages with impotency drugs you are more likely to receive a Viagra message than another user that only releases financial newsletters. This is why your feedback through ExchangeDefender Outlook Addin is so valuable to us. When you hit “Report SPAM” that message is dispatched to us and reviewed by a live human being that generates a scan rule to eliminate that specific message in the future.
ExchangeDefender SPAM engine uses third party scanning engines with realtime data feeds and our own proprietary engine is updated hourly.
That may seem excessive but keep in mind that spammers adapt their message content for each batch – adding a different subject, different web site, different spacing and subjects every few thousand messages. In order for us to keep up the need for both the realtime update and constant reengineering of the SPAM engine itself is cruical to eliminating as much of the annoyance as possible.
How come SPAM messages slip through?
There is no such thing as a “slip through” when it comes to SPAM, all mail that is not sent by a sender on an RBL that passes our virus scanning is considered legitimate until proven otherwise. Tens of thousands of checks later (within a split second) calculate a score that identifies if message is SPAM (90% confidence) or SureSPAM (99.9%). There is no person on the gateway reading each message, the score is assigned by the computer based on the statistical model – so even if you looked at the message and could clearly tell it’s SPAM, the artificial intelligence is not quite there yet.
How come legitimate messages end up in SPAM quarantines?
Bad scanning methodology. For example, say you’re receiving a lot of “lotto” SPAM. Someone at ExchangeDefender may adjust your model to get really aggressive when it encounters the word “lotto” in the subject or headers. It works flawlessly, until you are sent a message by your business partner and the message is also copied to Lisa Lotto. This is clearly an oversimplification but it happens.
How come updates happen every hour and why does it take so long sometimes to make changes?
Most of the implied delay is due to the size and the scope of the ExchangeDefender network – to protect millions of people we have a very large network and very sophisticated layered infrastructure. Smaller updates are done very frequently (within an hour) but are staggered (happening at the different minute of the hour) because during engine reloads individual nodes cannot process inbound mail. If we restarted the engine on every node at the exact same time we’d basically shut the network down for a few seconds every hour.
Some large-scale changes (when we add a plugin or change our model analysis or whitelists or blacklists or new detection procedures) can take on the order of weeks or months. Typically we don’t deploy new software across the whole network – it is done in stages to eliminate anomalies in the deployment. Working with large scale distributed systems is different than managing individual servers, clusters or even networks: Changes to a globally distributed network with linked load balancers (while great for redundancy and service availability) is a challenge that requires careful monitoring and rollout procedures to minimize destabilization across the whole network.
We get hack attempts and DDoS attacks thousands of times an hour – the systems have an automated process for dealing with that activity – so when we roll out new software that makes the network overload quickly (and make it think it’s under attack) we have a big mess on our hands. This is why the rollouts are staggered and have a procedure that is at times excruciatingly long (especially if you’re sitting in the NOC watching the queues and your blood pressure goes up with every uptick in the percent utilization)
How come whitelists don’t always work and I have to whitelist the whole domain?
This is an inconsistent behavior that is reported from time to time and it has to do with the senders email address and client software. ExchangeDefender looks at the From line (the same one you see in Outlook) and whitelists only the senders actual address. This works 99.9999% of the time.
Some senders use impersonalization or sending on behalf of a different email address or use specific taglines in the From address that end up being randomly generated for each email. While Outlook may see message from Vlad Mazek <vlad@ownwebnow.com> the message itself may have come From: vlad+2381ekr259@ownwebnow.com with a fingerprint used to track read receipts.
Long story short, if you have a person that is using these systems or CRM to alter the message for tracking/sales/marketing purposes, you can’t trust their From line for a whitelist, you will have to whitelist their whole domain. Good news is, this is typical for smaller domains and you’ll never be whitelisting all of @aol.com or @gmail.com
How come there are delivery delays?
Our support team can help you with that.
Half the time the issue is related to the DNS and the other half is due to the temporary network or Exchange issues on the client side. Almost all of the tests we have done for our clients fall into these two categories and almost all of the things you can do to minimize delays are outlined in our deployment guide.
In the event that the issue is our fault due to network congestion, filter failure, virus scanner malfunction, DDoS, routing issue, misconfiguration, etc – the issue is noted at http://www.exchangedefender.com/noc – please subscribe to the feed or @xdnoc or post your cell phone in our portal – we text, tweet, blog and (everything except email, for obvious reasons) notify you of any ongoing network issue that might impact service.
So much for tech..
Technology is only a piece of the whole puzzle.
This is going to sound cliché but I absolutely mean it 100%: At ExchangeDefender killing SPAM is our passion. Every piece of junk that passes through our network is unwelcome and we have people here around the clock working on eliminating it from making it’s way to your inbox. It’s a human process and it’s a technology process and the very practical implementation of artificial intelligence that learns and adapts in realtime to fight with SPAM. But just like training a dog takes time, training a computer is a challenge that requires consistency and strict implementation of the process, rules, management and monitoring. With millions and millions of messages passing through our gateways, even a slight insignificant modification can impact SPAM statistics models. It’s not something that’s “broken” that could be “fixed”, it’s just a process of continuous training that we take very seriously and enjoy very much.
Thank you for your business.
Sincerly,
Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
vlad@ownwebnow.com