Today sees the release of the latest major version of MDaemon, the popular email server for Windows and alternative to on premise Exchange.
Like all MDaemon releases, the developers at Alt-N continue to add new customer requested features and enhancements.
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.
Microsoft Small Business Server was discontinued in 2013, leaving a real niche for MDaemon as lots of small businesses were forced to decide between "full blown" Exchange (as I like to call it) or the cloud and Office365.
It's not a direct replacement - if you use all of Exchange's advanced features you'll most likely find something MDaemon won't do (shared custom category synchronisation springs to mind) and vice versa, but 95% of it's there.
Some pretty competitive pricing and no database to go all skewiff at 4:55pm on a Friday afternoon make it an attractive proposition for smaller companies in particular.
It was brought to my attention that Microsoft had recently launched a new iOS and Android Outlook {review app last week. Unlike previous Exchange sync features built into iOS and...
You may have picked up in the IT press recently that we're starting to see an industry-wide movement to a new, and importantly more secure, standard of SSL certificate.
Alt-N Technologies, developer of the Exchange alternative MDaemon Messaging Server have just announced they too are following this trend and stating they'll be replacing all end-point and intermediate server certificates with those based on the new SHA-2 algorithm.
Important note: Alt-N will be moving to SHA-2 SSL certificates on January 20, 2015.
This year in particular, I've seen an increasing number of users' email account credentials become compromised, which has allowed spammers free reign to use their mail server to send spam out to the Internet.
The usual result is an overflowing outbound mail queue, thousands of bounce messages coming in and your server's IP address being blacklisted.
The first thing to note is that if your company has an email server, you should assume that spammers will always be trying to hijack users' accounts by guessing their passwords.
In this post I will run through a few simple pro-active settings checks that can reduce the chances of this happening and - in the unfortunate event that it does happen - can limit the resulting negative effects.
Over the last 24 hours we have seen a few instances where valid email from Outlook.com servers has been rejected by our customers MDaemon and SecurityGateway servers due to SPF record checks.
The emails getting rejected do appear to be valid messages but have been arriving from an IP address not included in the sending servers SPF records. The common factor here is that all the sending domains are using outlook.com services.
Cyren's quarterly Internet Threat Trends reports are a MUST READ for IT professionals and MSP's alike and this one is no exception.
You could be forgiven for not recognising the Cyren name as they've recently rebranded from Commtouch, however Cyren are a huge player in the world of Internet security and provide the technology used by industry giants such as Google, Microsoft, Intel and T-Mobile.
Their real-time threat protection and antivirus engine also powers both MDaemon Messaging Server and SecurityGateway for Exchange.
Alt-N Technologies, BackupAssist, MailStore....they were all there. And that's not all, we were even fortunate enough to bag a couple of inspirational guest 
Today's nugget of MDaemon wisdom comes from conversations I've had with a small number of customers reporting they're unable to send outbound email to specific recipients.
Upon closer inspection of the error in the SMTP (OUT) log, there's a message reading "SSL negotiation failed".
