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.

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.

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.

Product review by ITSMDailyIndependent analyst and security director for EncSec, Graeme Batsman has appeared in, and advised, publications including SC Magazine, The Independent, Microsoft, Metro, Experian and many more. Graeme had recently been testing a number of email security products including those from vendors such as Barracuda and Sophos when we contacted him about 'hot off the press' SecurityGateway version 3.0.