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.
Keeping more email than is actually needed is a habit that most people fall in to at some stage. But make no mistake, it is a problem. And it's not one to be ignored.
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.
Rochdale, Lancashire. Birthplace of the Co-op, star of cinema and music hall Gracie Fields and home to such celebrity A-listers as Bill Oddie and Noorul Choudhury of BBC's The Apprentice. Week six no less.
An unlikely location for a "tech hub" you may think, and you'd be right...
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.
If you're already backing up your email as part of a standard routine, you could be forgiven for thinking that adding archiving to the mix would needlessly be doubling up.
I should mention at this point, if you're not doing anything at all, then you really need to be rectifying that situation rather than reading our blog (as nice as it is to have you).
