Ok brace yourself for a long ol' set of release notes! This minor MDaemon update really does highlight the many hours our friends at the Texas-based developer Alt-N Technologies are putting in to make MDaemon the best mail platform out there for small businesses. This one is mainly 'dotting the I's' as it were but there's an awful lot of them! Also if you've picked up one of the newer Android devices recently, you'll no doubt be pleased to hear that you can now connect it quite happily via ActiveSync thanks to the compatibility fix for KitKat.

Yes, the latest iteration of MDaemon Messaging Server is upon us! This most recent version of the popular Microsoft Exchange alternative for small businesses is only a point release - you could easily mistake it for a major update given the size of the release notes. With a long list of features to highlight for both admins and end users I'll waste no further time and get straight on with what I think you might find most interesting...

A question I'm frequently asked by users is "What happens to a user's mailbox in the event they leave the company?". My first response is usually to qualify what's going to happen with their email address once they've left. Will the address leave with them and will all further messages sent to that address will be bounced? Or will there be another member of staff taking over their role who'll need visibility of those existing messages? This is a decision for the business and companies will differ from each other in how they'll want to approach the managing of mailboxes and of staff turnover. Typically I find that companies will remove the Active Directory account as soon as the person has left, and they'll probably also choose to remove the email account from the mail server. Most organisations will tend to keep the email archive for this user intact for some time.

Research In Motion™ have just released an important security patch for the BlackBerry Enterprise Server platforms that could potentially affect MDaemon Messaging Server. This patch addresses a vulnerability in BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES)  that process images and so only affects MDaemon installations that have the optional BES server installed. If you're an MDaemon customer running the BES component we recommend you follow the instructions in this knowledge base guide to be on the safe side.

With the release of BlackBerry v10.0 last week, the method for synchronising the new set of BlackBerry 10 devices with MDaemon has changed. A BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) is no longer required for synchronisation, and handsets now use the ActiveSync standard for personal data synchronisation. The process of setting up an ActiveSync account on a BlackBerry 10 device is actually quite similar to the Android and iOS devices, requiring just the server details, email address and password in order to connect.

As well as letting you know whether or not the MDaemon server is running, the MDaemon envelope icon in the system tray will also change colour depending on the current server status. Where is the envelope icon? When MDaemon is running as a system service it will show a status icon in the system tray. Unfortunately the latest Microsoft Operating systems restrict running  services from interacting with the desktop automatically. Within Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 you will only see the MDaemon system tray icon after you have launched the MDaemon configuration session from the start menu at least once as the logged in user. You can then close the MDaemon configuration session and the icon will remain.

As you can imagine, this one's got the potential to cause a fair amount of head-scratching - I see it quite a lot too. Symptoms are that messages are being incorrectly quarantined by MDaemon's security module SecurityPlus even though the message is from a trusted sender and the attachment is clean of any viruses. Typically when we look into these examples there is one common factor.