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.

Our friends over at the German developer of MailStore Server have been busy conducting an international survey of 480 customers in the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Respondents were asked to rate the popular email archiving software in terms of documentation, support, product features from the administrator’s and user’s point of view, and the price/performance ratio. We're very pleased indeed to report that the response they received is in line with the glowing feedback we always hear as the UK distributor. For details, read the full report below...

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.

If you're using Office 365, or one of the many hosted Exchange variants available today, you may be aware that MailStore has long been able to give you a complete and automatically synchronised off-site copy of your mail. I've always been happy recommending it as a solution, Office 365 outages happen so it is popular among our customers, however when my colleagues over in the German development team at MailStore let me know about their recent breakthrough in the latest version, I could immediately see the potential for hosted Exchange customers.

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 victims speakers! Yes, just in case you've missed us shouting about it every five minutes, last month was our "PartnerMeet" event in Canary Wharf. As you've probably gathered, we don't do these that often (as often as we should!) and we were thrilled with the way it went, not least because of the great presentations made by the speakers we'd lined up for the day. If you weren't able to make it along then a) forever hold your head in shame and b) do not fear, we planned for this and took the liberty of booking a film crew to capture the lot. Enjoy footage in glorious HD of each and every presentation on the day....

New MDaemon releaseIt may only be labelled a point release, but version 14.5 is absolutely crammed with improvements, highlighted by the somewhat 'epic' release notes linked below. This release sees the addition of DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) support, which essentially standardises how email receivers perform email authentication using both SPF and DKIM.

A new SSL vulnerability is doing the rounds this morning, known as POODLE, or Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption. POODLE is a newly disclosed vulnerability in the legacy SSL 3.0 protocol that could be exposing users of newer Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption protocols to risk. If exploited, the POODLE flaw could potentially enable an attacker to access and read encrypted communications.