13
Jul
The BackupAssist MultiSite Manager
BackupAssist's MultiSite Manager (BAMM) is here, and if you're a registered partner program member, it's completely free for your own use.
If you manage more than a handful of BackupAssist customers, I hope this will be music to your ears, particularly if you're spending more time than you'd like checking the many emailed backup reports coming in from your various client sites every day.
Please note: BAMM is the replacement for BackupAssist's legacy Centralised Monitoring Console (CMC) which is now no longer supported.
I'll explain the key differences between the two in the moment, but if you're a reseller currently using the CMC, we highly recommend you migrate and here's why...
As an archiving solution for individuals, MailStore Home is a hidden gem, and one we're guilty of not giving enough exposure here on the blog.
In a nutshell, MailStore Home solves two of the biggest problems you're likely to face as a home user with a personal email account(s):
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!
In order to maintain their excellent reputation for secure software, 
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 - 
Today sees the latest point release in the roadmap of German developer MailStore, and in addition to a long list of fixes there are a couple of interesting new developments which have caught our collective Zen Software eye.
Version 9.2's 'juicy bits' that I'll talk a little more about in this post include:
With the EoL deadline for Windows Server 2003 fast approaching, decisions over operating system upgrades and in particular, whether or not to stick with Microsoft Exchange, are currently high up on the agenda for many small businesses.
For alternatives to Exchange such as MDaemon Messaging Server 
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.
If you're struggling to manage your mailbox sizes, or just need to keep email for long periods for compliance reasons, you may well have found yourself looking around for an archiving solution of some kind.
There are plenty out there, with many sharing some similarities, however it's the technical approach of the various products that's a good method for distinguishing them.
Some of the vendors you'll come across will employ the use of a technology known as 'stubbing'. As MailStore Server doesn't, in this post I'll take a brief look at what it is, and why it's German developers have decided against stubbing and instead chosen an alternative route.
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.