SoftCom Corporate Blog

When I ran a small business a few years ago the most important thing for me was to appear anything but small. I knew that one way my customers and suppliers validated my company was from my website, and as online searches for products and services become more common, this will increasingly be a source of business credibility.

Would you do business with a company that had a website with the contact info listed as bob@hotmail.com? That is why I am always amazed when I see someone with a website using a bulk email address like Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo on the site. These emails addresses can be obtained anoymously and as such, can’t be traced.

Well the good news is there is a simple solution:

All myhosting.com web hosting accounts include domain-based email accounts and unlimited email alias or forwarding accounts.

When I ask customers why they continue to use their bulk email address, they often say, “so many people have that address and I don’t want to lose any email.” However, there are a few simple things you can do to keep using your bulk email address and use a domain-based email address. And still only need to check all your email in one place.

The best case would be to setup an email account on your domain for each person or department like bob@youdomain.com or accounting@yourdomain.com then you can send and receive email using these addresses.

The instructions below cover creating a user on your mail server. In order to create a user, you must login to the Email Management Console. This can be done directly from your Control Panel or by logging in directly through your web browser as outlined below:

1. Open your Web browser and type the following in the address bar:

http://emailadmin.domain_name or http://emailadmin.myhosting.com/

2. Now you will need to Log in:

Type in your Admin email address for the username and your password.

3. Click Add User under the Manage Users section.
4. Enter the desired User ID. This will be the email account. Example, entering “joe” as the User ID will create the email account joe@yourdomain.com
5. Enter and Confirm the desired Password for this account.
6. You have just created an email account. On the left hand side you will see your newly created account under the Users folder.
7. Click on this User ID you have just created and you will be able to configure the following settings:

o User Profile
o Change Password
o Mail Forwarding
o Inbound Rules
o Vacation Message
o Auto Responder
o Advanced Options
o Manage Mailbox
o SMTP settings

8. Repeat the above steps to create additional email accounts for your domain.

Then simply forward your current email to that address, here are some links on how to do that:

Gmail - Hotmail - Yahoo

Another option would be to create an email alias on your domain that forwards to your bulk email address (email aliases are included free!). In that case something like info@yourdomain.com might be the most appropriate. An Alias is a reference on the server where email is sent, that will redirect email to the account or email address you specify. To create an alias for your domain, please follow the instructions below.

1. Open your Web browser and type in:

http://emailadmin.domain_name or http://emailadmin.myhosting.com/

2. Now you will need to Log in:

Type in Admin email address for the username and your password.

3. Click on the “Aliases” folder on the left side of the page
4. Click on “Add Alias”
5. Complete the fields accordingly.

New Alias Name: This is the actual alias name, and is the address to which the sender will direct mail. For example, if you wanted to receive mail sent to info@domain_name you would type ‘info’ in the field.

Resolves To: This is the e-mail address(es) or user account(s) to which any email will be routed. If the alias represents an existing user on your domain, simply type in their UserID (the part before the ‘@’ symbol in their email address). If the alias represents an email address, simply type the email address into the field. If you want an alias to resolve to more than one user, simply separate each entry on a new line.

6. Click Save.

Creating email addresses on your domain is easy and lends credibility to your organization. If you want a complete corporate email experience - one that allows you to send meeting requests to your customers, share calendars and use all the great features of Outlook 2007, including mobility - I suggest you check out our Microsoft Exchange Email offering.

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

I often get asked what I think is the most cost effective way to get mobile data. Should I get a BlackBerry or an ActiveSync supported device? (e.g. Windows Mobile, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson – look here for a complete list of supported devices)

Unfortunately there is no easy answer.  What I think is the most cost-effective relates to a combination of the device I use, my personal usage and most importantly, the data plan I subscribe to.  Data plans (GPRS) vary widely from carrier to carrier.

A lot of carriers offer great deals for data but sometimes those deals are limited to a specific device. AT&T/Cingular data plans come as low $19.99 for use with a select number of SmartPhones but to use the Samsung Blackjack you need to pay $39.99.  T-mobile offers a plan for $29.99 but neither of these include voice plans. The average cost for voice (minimum plan) + data seems to be between $60 and $80 per month.

That is if you stay within the data limits. Virgin Mobile in Australia launched a great plan, offering 300MB of data transfer per month for $10. Go over that allowance and you pay a rate of $15 per MB or almost 500 times the original rate.

So just how much data do you need to use the Internet over your mobile device? I get approximately 100 emails a day, have a massive inbox which I search regularly, have a fairly full calendar and a number of tasks I sync regularly. Using an ActiveSync device I use about 17 MB of data per month.  But because I have a very low data transfer allowance through my carrier, I avoid surfing the web unless absolutely necessary.

I have often been told that BlackBerry is much more efficient in its use of data as it relates to transmitting email, calendar data, tasks and related PIM information (most data usage, less what you use when surfing the web).  But if my usage is typical or even high, blackberries efficiencies may be irrelevant as the true cost of mobility relates to web traffic.

The true cost of ownership for a BlackBerry is really difficult to pin down:
- Are you on a personal plan or a business plan with a minimum user commitment?
- What is your contract duration?
- How much data do you want?
- How many voice minutes do you want?
- How many text messages do you need?

Almost all the carriers provide a complex pricing matrix for you to work with.  An informal poll suggests a range of $100 to $150 per month in North America and even higher in other parts of the world. Vodafone.co.uk will take you through a fairly complex wizard before letting you know you may need a 2nd mortgage to get a BlackBerry.

That said, there are a number of other reasons – outside of cost – why someone might prefer a BlackBerry or an ActiveSync-supported device. If the choice of the best device was an easy question to answer there would be a clear market leader, and that just isn’t the case. 

Only personal experience will tell which is right for you.  The good news is, with our Microsoft Exchange service you can use either technology.  ActiveSync is included free with our Exchange service and BlackBerry service is only $9.95 per month - a small price to pay once you’ve made the initial investment  into a mobile device. 

John Carthy
V.P. of Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

When looking for a good web host, there are a lot of important factors to consider. WebHosting Talk, a forum devoted to web hosting, recently published a survey indicating that reliability, security and support were considered the three most important factors – as identified by SME customers - when selecting a potential web host.

These are relatively easy things to investigate. Netcraft.com – an independent 3rd party that doesn’t provide hosting services – monitors the performance of hosting companies and makes their findings publicly available.

When investigating support, look for a 24/7 tool free telephone number on the website and make sure it’s included with the plan you want to subscribe to.

Security is a little more involved: What is their datacenter like? Have they had any major security breaches? How long have they been doing business? (this is important as companies who haven’t figured this out don’t tend to last very long).

But there are other factors that aren’t discussed as much. One of them is having something called a dedicated IP address which can have a major impact on site security.

An IP address, for those that don’t know, is the 12 digit number behind a domain name used to resolve a request. Domain names were invented because people can’t remember really long numbers so a name was essentially mapped to a number. For example if you type 168.144.1.9 into your browser you will go to http://www.softcom.biz. Either the domain name or the IP will work.

Because there is a limited number of IP addresses available, many hosting companies give their customers shared IP addresses (many domain names under one IP address) and then use programmatic methods to resolve any request for a domain name on a shared IP address. Visitors will be able to reach a website hosted on a shared IP address but there are some shortcomings.

The main shortcoming is SSL security. If you are running an eCommerce site or any type of content that requires encryption, you will want to have a dedicated IP address. Otherwise visitors will get a warning that the site name doesn’t match the name on the SSL key.

There are also SEO or search engine optimizations concerns to consider. Many people have found that sites with a dedicated IP address do mysteriously better in search engine results than those utilizing shared IPs. This isn’t proven, but why take a chance with something as important as being indexed in the major search engines.

myhosting.com was fortunate enough to get a large block of IP addresses when it was founded 10 years ago and provides a dedicated IP address with all its Windows sites. As for support and reliability – you won’t find anyone better.

John Carthy
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

I was at HostingCon in Chicago last week and I heard someone comment about whether “email was still the killer app.”

Besides being a slightly useless thing to say, it occurred to me that email never was a killer app. A text message is a message.  Rather it’s the tools used to manage messaging in combination with the protocol that makes for the better experience.

Truth is a lot of people I speak to don’t understand the difference between POP3 email, IMAP4 email and MAPI services. As a result, they don’t understand why Microsoft Exchange is so expensive (Microsoft Exchange email is based on MAPI) and so useful.

Let’s start with POP3. That’s the basic email that comes with most hosting plans or is provided by your ISP or cable company. The most important thing to understand about POP3 is that your messages are stored on the email server until you access them through a common POP3 client like Outlook, Outlook Express or Eudora. 

When you connect to your POP3 email account through one of these clients, all your unread email messages are downloaded to your local machine for you to read. They are removed from the server.

The one exception is checking your POP3 accounts through the mail2web.com email retrieval application (mail2web.com). This webmail application allows you to preview your messages, on almost any remote mail server , before they’ve been downloaded. 

We get a lot of complaints from mail2web.com users who think we’ve deleted their emails. What actually happened was someone opened Outlook on their desktop and downloaded all their messages off a POP3 server.  Now those messages reside in someone’s office / home PC and can’t be easily accessed.

IMAP4 is different in that email is stored on the server. There is an added bonus of being able to create folders to manage your messages. When you connect to an IMAP4 account, the messages are not downloaded to your local computer but instead are previewed for you, recording what has been read and what hasn’t and allowing you to move messages to folders you created. 

This is important as IMAP4 accounts give you the ability to access your email from multiple locations and computers and maintain a synchronized copy.

 All the email accounts provided with hosting plans on myhosting.com are both POP3 and IMAP4 compatible. Apple’s iPhone uses the IMAP4 protocol for email syncronization which you can use with our Exchange hosting plans or our myhosting.com email acccounts.

But the killer app is Microsoft Exchange based on the MAPI protocol.  Okay,  I hate the term ‘killer app’ . . . but it’s the best messaging platform on the market.  MAPI is an ‘aware’ protocol and by that I mean it is constantly listening for changes on the server and then communicates those changes to you, however you are connected (browser, desktop, mobile device). If you are running Outlook with a full Exchange account (our Professional account) you don’t have to constantly click send and receive to see if you have new messages. Changes are pushed as they are recorded on the server.

Like IMAP4, all messages are stored on the server but Exchange also stores your calendar, contact, journal, tasks and much more. All this data is ‘aware’ of changes and communicates those changes immediately. You can also share real-time data with others in your organization and collaborate in a way you could never do with POP3 or IMAP.

Of course all this enhanced functionality requires extensive hardware to support. While diskspace costs have gone down considerable in the past 5 years, even the best SCSI drives have a maximum rate at which they can read or write data.

Exchange hits this maximum quickly with very few active users. And that’s just one of the reasons why Microsoft Exchange is so much more expensive than POP3. Microsoft’s monthly license fees - charged directly to Exchange hosters - also adds to our costs.

But it’s still much less than what your business pays for phone service and in my opinion, just as important and effective for running an efficient business.

John Carthy
V.P. of Sales and the Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.