BackupAssist v9.0Weak passwords are the most common method by which email accounts and servers can become compromised by spammers.  The great news is that Exchange alternative MDaemon Messaging Server, now offers an easy way to identify when somebody's using one that isn't secure via a simple but effective new reporting feature. Whether you then decide to name and shame, or just to give them a friendly nudge is entirely up to your discretion! :).

These days we all expect our email to work flawlessly when we're outside of the office, regardless of how we're connected. Occasionally though, a change of connection is all it takes to cause issues. In this post I take a quick look at why, if you connect to your own mail server using an SMTP connection (not applicable to ActiveSync users) from your mobile device, laptop or even desktop machine, you might experience problems with sending email. Oh, and what you can do about it of course!

Will MailStore alert me when a job fails? Of the many queries I see as a member of the MailStore support team here at Zen Software, this is one of the more common ones. Unfortunately, for the time being at least, this isn't something you can do from within the software but fear not - the reason for my post is that there is a workaround. EDIT: Email reporting was introduced in v10.1 - more information here.

To the unfamiliar, the 'Reverse Lookup' might sound like something you'd see in one of Tom Daley's diving routines. However in email and DNS terms, it's an essential security check which can dramatically reduce the amount of spam you're seeing. It's also one of those many tricky DNS areas that causes confusion so I hope this post will help demystify it a little.

In order for any users to log in to email archiving software MailStore Server, a local 'MailStore' user account needs to exist. You could simply just manually create users, entering usernames and passwords individually. However for any installation with more than a handful of users, as you can probably imagine, that can soon end up becoming a pain. For this reason, MailStore includes the directory services feature to synchronise local accounts with an external user list which is what I'm going to cover in this post.

With the recent Panda Antivirus signature problem still fresh in my mind, and as a fair few of our support calls continue to be antivirus related, I thought you might find it useful if I share some of the antivirus issues we see regularly tripping customers up. Of course every software vendor professes their product incorporates the latest and greatest protection technology. When you're working out what to use as a Systems Administrator however, it's also important to think beyond that and specifically about how your proposed solution will interact with other applications in your network environment. These are a handful of the areas we find usually end up resulting in a support call.

The sheer amount of email that flows across the internet every day is staggering, but what's all too easy to overlook is just how insecure this form of communication actually is. Often email delivery is compared to traditional paper post in that there is an envelope containing a letter, there are senders and there are recipients. In reality, the comparison is much more similar to a postcard.

We've just made the latest version of MailStore live on our site and if you, or perhaps your customers, are users of Google Apps, it's one I highly recommend you download. The ability to archive Google mail isn't completely new to MailStore, however in previous versions, each mailbox would need to be archived individually, requiring a separate archiving 'job' and manual entry (and ongoing maintenance) of username and password credentials. In version 9.1, the German developer have now made the whole process a breeze.