SoftCom Corporate Blog

In my last post I discussed a number of the steps we take to try and keep spam out of your mailbox. I just wanted to take this opportunity to further expand upon the use of RBL lists. The idea behind RBL lists is to compile a list of mail servers which fall into one of the following categories:

1. Open for relay - meaning they are easily hijacked by spammers.
2. Disreputable ISPs that allow spammers to use their email servers.
3. ISPs that do not actively respond to spam complaints against their servers by disciplining or shutting down users who spam.

By listing these email servers in RBL lists and actively using these RBL lists to block unwanted mail, we’re all doing our part to encourage bad ISPs to clean up, and to encourage consumers to use secure and reputable email hosting services and ISPs.

Although we feel we’re fighting the good fight, sometimes innocent users end up getting caught in the crossfire. Some users may not agree with the use of RBL lists, or may be unwilling to change hosting providers. So this is our motivation for providing the new Whitelist feature which allows you to decide whether you want to allow mail from select servers that appear in the “Blacklist”. This allows you to enter the IP Address of the sender’s server into your domain-level Whitelist, which will circumvent the RBL for that domain. We even make it easy for the sender and the recipient by providing them with a method to easily request and approve the Whitelist entry.

We feel that these steps give you the best of both worlds, protecting you from the bulk of annoying and unwanted email, while still allowing the email you want to receive to come through. I hope this helps shed some light on the subject.

Happy Holidays,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

With all the recent fanfare from Microsoft about Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 the release of the latest version of Windows SharePoint Services flew in under the radar of most people.

In previous versions SharePoint has failed to gain wide adoption I think mostly due to a disconnect of the product and the market. The needs of customers were not entirely met by the features of Version 2.0 and more importantly few people were aware of what SharePoint was or how it could be leveraged. With the launch of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 there is a huge opportunity to change all that.

 What is SharePoint?

Even to those who have used it that is a question that is not easily answered. There is of course a technical answer that covers things like secure storage in SQL database and availability and reliability based on a Windows 2003 platform.

The real questions are what can it do for me? And how do I use it?

These are the questions that if the platform is going to become widely used need to be answered. If someone asks me what is Exchange Email? The simple answer is the engine that makes Outlook more than just desktop software to check email. Similarly SharePoint take Microsoft Office beyond the desktop application.

There has been a lot of talk about SaaS (software as a service) or web based applications that offer function of the desktop with the accessibility and cost savings of the web. I am excited by the potential of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to deliver the platform to make SaaS both accessible and affordable for our SMB customers.

What our small and medium businesses customers tell us they need are solutions that are easy to use, protect their data and fit into the budget!

With the new On Demand Business Solution built on the SharePoint platform I belive those needs are met.

• Solutions that are ready to use as deployed and can be customized to the needs of your business.
• Functional integration with the Microsoft Office suite that you use and are familiar with.
• Information that is secure, password protected, highly available via the internet on your PC or mobile device.
• No setup or hardware cost just a predictable monthly fee for storage and access.
• Unlimited users and document level security permissions so you can share information both internally and with supplier and customers.

The complete solution will be ready for the market in early 2007 but you can check out our online demo or signup for a beta site now!

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

This holiday season I’m not going to be coy about what I want. I want a PalmOne Treo 750v. It’s the latest Palm device out and like its predecessor, the PalmOne Treo 700, it runs on Windows Mobile 5.2 and not the Palm OS.

Why do I want one? Easy, I want the ultimate smart phone for personal use. I have a Blackberry for work but if I un-holster that bad-boy when I’m at a holiday gathering everyone knows I’m still at work.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Blackberry but this new Palm has some great consumer features – touch screen, High-Speed Data GPRS, speaker phone, camera, and a bunch of other ‘fun’ features. With the latest design they even dropped the antennae giving it a much sleeker look.

Running Windows Mobile 5.0+ means I can take advantage of ActiveSync, and in combination with an Exchange 2003 service with SP2 installed, get my email and other data pushed to my device as fast as the Blackberry. If you don’t believe me, sign up for our mail2web.com LIVE service (FREE) and try it out.

This begs the question - what is better, a Blackberry or a Pocket PC running Windows Mobile 5.0?

Obviously for a question of this magnitude I need to refer to Paris Hilton. Below is a shot of Paris with a Blackberry 8700. Of course she is famous for having a Side Kick phone, having it hacked and then having her nasty messages leaked on the Internet.

I would suspect the reason she moved over to the Blackberry is for security reasons. Blackberry certainly wins when it comes to security. Rumor is Madonna has one too.

But notice that Paris is never seen with her Blackberry in a holster. She’s always got it clutched in her hands, eagerly awaiting some very important, probably dirty message. But she’s missing a very unique feature of the Blackberry that makes it the choice of many businesses and fleets. The Blackberry behaves differently when holstered and uses alerts and receipts when messages are sent and received. I think this helps organizations armed with Blackberry’s stay better connected.

Me, I want to join the current trend in Europe, who average more than 1 mobile phone per person, and have one mobile for work and another for play.

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

We get a lot of questions about our Blackberry service. The most common one we see is usually phrased something like this:

“Why do I need your Blackberry service if I already got one from my provider? - I even got an email address that works on my Blackberry”

What most people get from their provider is the actual Blackberry device, a data plan so they can surf the web and send and receive emails and an email address under the providers domain name.

This is the ‘BIS’ or Blackberry Internet Service. A keen user will even discover that they can also redirect an existing email account to their Blackberry and use that as their ‘from’ address.

But the BES or Blackberry Enterprise Server does much more. This service is always bundled with an Enterprise messaging solution like Lotus Notes or Hosted Exchange - solutions that go way beyond email and provide more workflow and time management functionality to your desktop. Unlike BIS, BES allows you to syncronize all those additional features to your Blackberry.

As far as I know Lotus Notes doesn’t have a ‘hosted’ model. Microsoft Exchange does and the feature set is way to large to expand upon in this post. But not only can you use any email address you like with Hosted Exchange, with the combination of Hosted Exchange and the BES service, you can synchronize your entire desktop including your calendar, contacts, tasks, journal, notes and much more, with your Blackberry.

Add another user to your domain and you can share all this data, view each other’s calendars (or keep it private), accept meeting requests and basically do everything you would do when working with Outlook at your desktop.

And whatever you do on your Blackberry will be in sync with your desktop and vice-versa.  

With some patience your thumbs get pretty nimble and pretty soon your favorite PC becomes a permanent fixture on your hip. 

So while the BIS service is perfectly adequate for many individual users, the BES service used in combination with Hosted Exchange is a must for the power user or the business user. Once you actually experience the difference you’ll understand the true meaning of the term ‘Crackberry’.

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

A while back, Microsoft made an announcement about their new ‘LIVE’ initiative. It wasn’t clear then exactly what this meant and I’m not entirely sure now. The basic message was they were going to provide free web-based services to small businesses and consumers. Those services would be ad-based and would come in the form of email, domain registration, personal home pages, messaging ect.

Here’s a definition I found for Windows LIVE: Windows Live is a set of personal Internet services and software designed to bring together in one place all of the relationships, information and interests people care about most, with more safety and security features across their PC, devices and the Web.

Okay . . . still a bit vague but it begs the larger question, why? Collectively Yahoo, Microsoft and Google are building two of the largest datacenters the world has ever seen so I suspect there is a bigger plan for world dominance of online services. To speculate on the tactics would require many additional posts.

But there is no mystery to why we offer free services.

We’ve been offering free web-based, ad-supported services for years. We’ve been running our mail2web email retrieval service for almost 10 years. We run some advertisements to help pay for the service but other than that there is no hook. It’s anonymous and secure; we don’t collect passwords or SPAM people.

We do it because we love online technology. We thought it was really cool to provide a service that allowed our customers access to their email from any internet-connected device.  And we hoped that people would appreciate this, recognize our competence and maybe sign up for our other paid services. With Google, Microsoft and Yahoo as competitors you have to do some pretty unique things to survive.

That was the thinking when we launched mail2web.com LIVE. We’ve been working with Microsoft Exchange for years and thought we’d launch a free, web-based version so people could see the interface and some of the features. We embedded an ad to help pay some of our overhead costs (like Microsoft licenses) but ultimately we wanted to showcase our expertise with Microsoft Exchange and allow people to try the product and service. We hope some might upgrade to a paid version of the product – we have several – but with any of our free offerings, there is no requirement to do so and very few limitations on the functionality.

I hope our message is clear. 

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

Sharepoint: I’m starting to see the point

I saw a blog post the other day in reference to Windows Sharepoint Services. The author complained about the lack of tangible messaging around Microsoft Sharepoint Services. The post, entitled, “What The heck is Sharepoint 2007”, by John Newton, contained the following: 

“You are not told what Sharepoint is; you are told what Sharepoint does . . . I don’t know. No one does, and Microsoft isn’t telling. I’m sure they’ll be happy to tell you once you pay. You see, that’s how proprietary software works: pay first, struggle with it later. Buy before you try.”

Well this is bit cynical and honestly I haven’t quoted all of article but he has a point. I see words like ‘collaborate’, ‘share’, ‘increase productivity’ which could easily be used to describe almost anything, including several other Microsoft products. And who could argue with those virtues? The only person I know who isn’t inclined to share, collaborate or be productive is my two-year old son.

Today we launched a Beta of Windows Sharepoint Services 2007 (the hosted version not to be confused with Portal Server), so I think I’m in a position to tell you what it does:

1. Windows Sharepoint Services is a platform used to host password-protected sites.
2. Those sites are designed primarily as secure, document repositories – has anyone in your organization ever said, “we need an intranet”, well that’s what Sharepoint does very well and it doesn’t require programming.
3. The administrator can decide who has access and how much access (just read or can they modify a document), and everyone can be informed when a document has been updated via email notification.

Of course there’s a lot more to it but that’s the basics of Windows Sharepoint Services 2003. The latest version, 2007, goes much further. Coming in January, Microsoft will be providing tons of ‘templates’ but I think that’s a misleading name that doesn’t do it justice. Templates imply ‘skins’ or design layers. The templates Microsoft is releasing are actually applications. There’s a CRM application coming, an HR application, a product management application, and many more, each developed with a specific function in mind.

The market for these functions are small-to-medium-sized businesses who don’t need, or can’t afford Enterprise applications. They need a subset of the features saleforce.com offers and have a fraction of the budget.

With this release of Windows Sharepoint Services I think Microsoft is truly delivering on the SaaS promise (Software as a Service) and making it accessible to those who need it the most. And contrary to what the above author says, Microsoft isn’t going to sell this to you, it’s hosting companies like us who have no interest in ‘tricking’ you into a sale when you can cancel as easily as you signed up. Services on demand can be cancelled on demand.  

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

A lot of talk lately about Microsoft Exchange. Some of it only makes sense to people who are intimate with the product. I’ve heard people say, “if you’re serious about your business you’ll get Exchange’. But what does that mean? Why do I need to get an Exchange server? What is an Exchange server?

In simple terms, Microsoft Exchange is the engine that powers Microsoft Outlook. A lot of people use Microsoft Outlook to manage a basic email account - a vanilla email account you might get for free, from your ISP or included with a hosting plan - technically referred to as POP3 or IMAP4.

These are not Exchange accounts and if this is what you use you are not getting the full messaging experience.

An Exchange powered Outlook account does much more. Our website can explain the individual benefits but if you want to share, collaborate, manage your time and messaging better, get it.

Email has become as important to businesses as a phone but if you don’t have a good email account, it won’t seem like a good communications tool.

A good communications tool is always in sync. If I accept a meeting request through my mobile device, it will appear in my calendar on my desktop. If I change the time of the meeting on my desktop it will be reflected when I use the web-based interface for Outlook. Email that doesn’t do that creates more work than it solves.

So it’s not just the desktop client you get with the complete Outlook solution. Sign up for an account and you get a copy of Outlook 2003, a web-based interface (OWA) that looks and behaves almost exactly the same and a light mobile interface (OMA) for when you’re on a weak connection. Use ActiveSync or enable the Blackberry service and you’re as efficient at your desk as you are on the golf course (and nobody needs to know).

If you agree Microsoft Exchange is one of the best messaging solutions in the market, the question remains, how do I get it? Some try to host it themselves, others now out-source.

If your business has a highly trained, 24/7 operations staff, 24/7 physical security, experienced Exchange administrators on staff, an amazing connection to the internet, fully-redundant hardware, sophisticated backup . . . and tons of money, then you should host it yourself.

Otherwise, the out-source model makes the most sense. Who you choose to out-source is another matter. Whoever you use, make sure they have all the above, have automatic provisioning (add / upgrade accounts only as you need them), and provide free upgrades to the lastest versions as they become available.

If you’re serious about your business you’ll focus on your business. You didn’t try to setup your own phone system - why try and manage the rest of your communications. And finally, if you’re serious about your business, don’t use a hotmail account. Use another Microsoft product - Exchange.

Sincerely,
John Carthy
V.P. Sales and Marketing
Softcom Technology Consulting Inc.

We’ve become so accustomed to spam cluttering up our mailboxes, that it’s hard to remember that there was ever a time without it. In fact, the origins of spam go back so far that it is unlikely that any of us were fortunate enough to ever enjoy a spam-free mailbox.

We can draw a lot of similarities between postal mail and email. However unsolicited postal mail and unsolicited email have some significant differences. With unsolicited postal mail, the cost of delivery is entirely covered by the sender. This is not the case with spam email. Of course the spammers will pay for part of the delivery cost, but the majority of the delivery cost is paid by the recipients’ email service provider in bandwidth, CPU usage and storage space. These costs are often passed on to you, the end user via your subscription fees. So spam is not only annoying, but it is costly to all of us. By some estimates, spam accounts for up to 85% of all email.

Here at SoftCom, in order to try and reduce these costs, we use a number of different mechanisms to try and eliminate spam – even before it is delivered to our email servers.  Currently, we use two important checks before accepting the email from the sending server.

1. We check against a number of reputable RBL lists, or Realtime Blackhole Lists. An RBL is basically a list of email servers or service providers whose customers are responsible for the SPAM or whose servers have been hijacked for SPAM relay. Any connections to our email server from a server on the lists we use will be rejected, and the email will not be accepted for delivery.
2. The second line of defense is to check the recipient email address against our list of users. Any email sent to a nonexistent user is rejected. This type of email can even be a result of an email dictionary attack, a technique often used by spammers to try and discover new email addresses to target with spam.

Surprisingly, these two types of connections to our mail server account for up to 92% of all attempted connections to our email servers. If we were to accept all of these connections that our email server capacity would need to be increased by as much as ten times just to be able to handle the volume. For a customer on our Basic hosting plan ($9.95/month), this could mean a price increase of up to $10, doubling the monthly fee. (But don’t worry, we don’t have plans to do anything as drastic as that!)

The remaining 8% of email that is accepted is then scored against our Anti-Spam system which uses a series of rules and checks to determine the likelihood that any given email is spam. Anti-Spam rules will result in an email being given points towards an overall score. In general, email with a score of 5 or greater is considered to be spam. About 42% of all accepted email scores a 5 or greater, and 58% scores under 5. This means that up to 95.4% of all email either attempted or accepted to myhosting.com email servers is spam or suspected spam.

In addition to all this, we perform Anti-Virus scans on all incoming email, as well as some Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus scans on outgoing email to ensure that our servers are a source of clean email.

But that isn’t all… there are some further steps you can take. Due to the way the Anti-Spam system works, you can choose from multiple options on how to handle the spam that arrives makes it to your inbox. You can choose to tag email scoring 5 or higher with SPAM in the subject, thus allowing you to create an email rule to sort or delete unwanted spam. You can choose to take no action at all. Or you could even make a custom rule which checks the email header for the Spam score, and filters your mail based on your own thresholds. This allows you to increase or decrease the sensitivity of the Anti-Spam setting on your own. For our mail2web.com Exchange customers, this can even be adjusted from the control panel.

And for those users who want to bypass the RBL checks, it is now possible for myhosting.com customers to whitelist servers that don’t pass our RBL checks, on a per account basis.  And we’re planning to provide this feature for mail2web.com Exchange customers in the near future as well.

Although we do as much as possible to keep your inbox free of spam, nothing is perfect. Spammers are always trying new techniques to get past our filtering methods. And since the volume of email requires the use of an automated system, there are from time to time both false-positives and false-negatives. But we aren’t letting our guard down yet and we’ll continue to do whatever we can to keep your inbox Spam free.

Thanks,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

More and more, we’re seeing a shift in the way that people communicate on the internet. Here at SoftCom we’ve decided to make the leap and move from sending periodic email newsletters to more frequent blog posts. This allows us to get more detailed about any subject, and it allows you, the reader, to decide when and how you want to read that content. With many blogs comes a feature known as RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. And although it is becoming fairly common, we wanted to take some time to explain to you how you can use this to keep up to date with our blog.

1. From your BrowserSome browsers, such as Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox include features which allow you to add RSS feeds in your Favorites or Bookmarks. When you are on a website that has an RSS Feed, you’ll see an icon like this in your browser’s Address field or one of your Toolbars.   This is usually an indication that you can add the Feed to your Favorites or Bookmarks. For IE7 users, clicking on this button will allow you to add the RSS Feed to your “Feeds” Favorite Folder which will then be accessible from your Favorites Center (Alt+C). For Firefox users, clicking on the icon will allow you to create a “Live Bookmark”, which you can place anywhere in your Bookmarks, including your Bookmarks Toolbar Folder.
2. Using a RSS Reader or News AggregatorThere are basically two different types of RSS Readers: the kind that you install on your computer, and the kind that you use from the web - and there are advantages to both. With a web-based RSS reader, you can read your subscriptions for any computer that is connected to the internet.  With a software-based RSS reader, you can download your RSS Feed updates and read them when you’re offline. We have subscription buttons for some of the most popular online RSS Readers on the right-side of this blog, which include Bloglines, Google Reader and NewsGator. Some popular RSS Readers include FeedDemon, FeedReader and RssReader. There are literally hundreds out there for you to choose from.
3. Customizable Portal PagesThese types of services, like My MSN, My Yahoo and My AOL, allow you to add custom content on your page including RSS feeds. For your convenience, we’ve added buttons for the most popular portal pages on the left side of the page. These websites differ from RSS Readers in that they usually display more than just RSS Feeds, and any RSS Feeds you do add will be displayed inline with your other content.

We hope that you take this opportunity to explore our blog and subscribe to our RSS Feed, using whatever method you prefer most. We’ll do our best to keep this blog updated with the latest news and information that is both relevant to the services we offer, and to your needs.

Sincerely,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

We humans are social creatures. We seek out the opinions of those we trust before we make important decisions. This is especially true when we are in the market for  new products or services. I know I get asked all the time, “have you heard about this company” or “who would you recommend for that service”. That is why word of mouth advertising is still one of the most effective ways to introduce people to products.

I have always felt the best sales force is made up of satisfied customers. I also believe our products and services are of real value. It is for these reasons I was excited when our Affiliate Program was launched recently.

Our program gives you the opportunity to earn money by referring customers to our services. This is a real win-win program.

What do you get out of it?

• Cash payout for qualified sales
• Marketing support (links, banners and product info)
• Free to join

What do we get out of it?

• Valuable advertising investment
• New customers recommended by you
• The opportunity to reward you for your loyalty

Sound interesting? If you want more information go to http://softcom.biz/Affiliate/ and check it out.

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.