ba-wordpress-700x353 I'm pretty sold on the fact that for a small business in particular, a backup product needs to be simple to get going with, low maintenance, and on the rare occasion you need support, that there's somebody on the end of the phone to help you quickly. Yes, you guessed it - I, from my completely unbiased position, think BackupAssist is a better product for a small company than BackupExec so I'm offering you another good reason to think about moving across. Starting today, if you make the switch to BackupAssist from Symantec BackupExec 2010 or later, for a limited time, when you buy the core BackupAssist application with 2 year's upgrade protection, we'll give you the second year completely free! . Upgrade Protection entitles you to all new versions, lets you link your software to the Multisite Manager if you wish, and of course provides our top-notch phone, email and remote support, completely free! Ready to take a closer look at BackupAssist? Download the free trial

MDaemon 16.5 It's inconvenient, it undoubtedly costs your business money and it has the potential to cause you headaches of epic proportions. Perhaps that's not the greatest sales strap line you've ever read? Well, that's because I'm not referring to MDaemon, in this case, I'm talking about your friend and mine, spam email. You know, that particularly enjoyable type where seemingly innocuous messages from colleagues/ suppliers/ customers, turn out to be from one of those aspiring Mr. Robot types hell-bent on crypto'ing the life out of your data. In 16.5 there's less chance of that happening as one of the new features of interest is the simple, but effective 'From Header Protection/ Modification'. That's not all - there's auto-updating, centralised Outlook Connector settings, an XMPP server (yes, I had to Google it too) and some improvements to Worldclient you've been asking for. Here are my highlights - as usual, you can find the exhaustive version available in the MDaemon Release Notes.

better-mailstore-email-alertsLast year I wrote this article that described how you could use a combination of MailStore email archiver's auditing features, the Windows task manager and a PowerShell script to send you email alerts in the event an archiving job failed. This worked well but it was a little on the keen side, occasionally being triggered by a job failing that would actually just go on to run fine again shortly afterwards.

Storage WarsIf you're considering a backup strategy for your business, it won't be long before you need to start thinking about storage media, and which of the various types is best suited to your needs. In this post, I attempt to help by doing my best, to sum up the strengths and weaknesses of each as I see them, from my experience of working with customers using BackupAssist for Windows (which we're distributors of). I hope this will be of some use to you regardless of the software you're using, however, this is written with BackupAssist users in mind. First up....USB drives.

SecurityGateway v4.0Would you find it useful to be able to see the entries in a colleague's calendar? Perhaps a few of you share a meeting room and you'd like the ability to manage bookings? Maybe you just need an out-of-office responder you can set from Outlook? Today sees a new point release of Outlook Connector, a highly recommended add-on for MDaemon Messaging Server. It's the part that provides all of the above, plus lots more 'Exchange-like' functionality to help you work more efficiently by collaborating better with your colleagues. Here are the highlights of this minor update - as always, you can find a more detailed list in the official release notes.

SecurityGateway v4.0Whether it's mildly irritating offers for cut-price blue pills, or something altogether more sinister such as holding your company files ransom, today's cyber-criminals are using increasingly sophisticated and varied techniques to target your business by email. Today saw the latest major release of SecurityGateway, a software firewall that sits between your Exchange, MDaemon, Kerio or Smartermail server, and your router, protecting your organisation from spam, viruses, spoofing, phishing and more. In this post, we take a whistle-stop tour of the new features. As always, this is just our highlights, a comprehensive list of all new features and enhancements can be viewed in the SecurityGateway Release Notes.

Gmail-block-ipv6I wanted to share an issue we've seen multiple reports of this week, where MDaemon customers have started receiving bouncebacks from Google mail servers. Valid email is being refused due to PTR record failures, and it's happening for all Gmail domains including customer registered domains that are used with Google services.

BackupAssist v9.3.0Developer Cortex I.T. have just announced the latest point release of BackupAssist, and it's a version we're highly recommending you upgrade to. In addition to the usual minor tweaks and improvements, there are two particularly good reasons we recommend you upgrade...
  • FIX: An important fix for Exchange backups - this release fixes a recently discovered issue concerning Exchange backups.
  • NEW: Great new restore search feature - a brand new feature to make even lighter work of locating your backed up files and folders.

MDaemon 15.5Despite the rise in popularity of cloud services, many businesses still prefer the control, privacy and dedicated nature of their own email server. MDaemon has been at the top of the list of alternatives to Microsoft Exchange for some time, and with this latest release, Texas-based developer Alt-N strengthens their place with a range of new features to help small business owners and admins alike. In this post I briefly highlight the new additions I think you'll find most interesting, including a fantastic new addition to the spam protection armoury and some terrific news if you're an iPhone or Apple OS X device user. As always, this is just our highlights, a comprehensive list of all new features and enhancements can be viewed in the MDaemon Release Notes.