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Scientifically proven to solve precisely 99.3% of all technical problems faced by modern civilisation, your ability to "turn it off and on again" is perhaps the most powerful weapon you have in your arsenal as a seasoned IT professional. It's important to be realistic however, and, at some point it is I'm afraid, quite likely you'll be required to go beyond the call of duty. Of course you should always try pumping the on/off button of affected hardware hysterically to be absolutely certain the geek magic has transferred but failing that you should ready yourself for tough times ahead. Yes, you may well need to 'Google', to diagnose symptoms and worse still, troubleshoot with your brain. In extreme cases, you should be warned, it's not unheard of that the more demanding customers may ask that you plan to prevent the problem from happening again. Pooled from thousands of IT professionals around the globe, the following software utlities, web services and how-to guides will help you be prepared should the unthinkable strike.

Yes, for the next few days we’re unashamedly jumping on the bandwagon of our American friends and slashing the cost of new licences by 25% for the brilliantly simple email archiving software, MailStore Server. Example pricing: 10 user licence = £214.28 + VAT  (Save £71.42!)

Our installation guide for MDaemon users details how to get MailStore up and running using a combination of two archiving jobs (journalling and mailbox). That works really well if you want to archive everyone's mail, but sometimes I'm asked about archiving for a handful of users only. Fortunately MDaemon uses a highly customisable content filter to journal mail which means it's flexible enough to make this possible...here's how I suggest you go about it...

We've seen a sharp increase today in new virus variants getting through to email users due to the speed at which they're evolving to avoid detection.

Identical messages can arrive sometimes minutes apart but already containing different variants of the virus, making it a game of cat and mouse for the security vendors to keep up. The fake Amazon order confirmation complete with suspicious-looking ZIP file is the one we've heard a lot of reports about but I should stress these emails change by the minute so it's worth just thinking twice before you click links or open anything resembling an attachment.

UPDATE: 10/12/13 Google released Android 4.4.2 today and I can confirm that this now fixes the Exchange sync issue on my Nexus 5. See below for more details... A couple of us in the office have just taken delivery of some shiny new Nexus 5's - fantastic devices we're really happy with but we've unfortunately both come across what looks to be a known issue setting up the ActiveSync connection to synchronise them with MDaemon Messaging Server. MDaemon has an integrated ActiveSync server but this issue with the devices will also apply to those of you who use Microsoft Exchange.

BackupAssist announcementIn the latest version of BackupAssist (7.3.1), there was a change to the activation process I'd like to make you aware of as it's understandably catching a few customers out. In the latest version there was a change implemented to help ensure that as a customer you're on the 'local' build of the software, complete with support links that point back to our technical team here in the UK.

BackupAssist Technical Support InsightWe often get support queries where the PC clock has been the cause of an issue but never have I seen a few minutes of drift make such a difference. This one isn't actually specific to BackupAssist but it did rear its head with a customer who happened to be storing their backups on a local NAS. The backup job in question was a 'file protection' one, so the simple backup of files to a local network share as a destination. The job had run fine for many days without errors but suddenly overnight the job would fail with an error like the one below:-