To read the article in its entirety and learn more about the software solutions that Ipswitch offers, click on the following link:  http://www.imailserver.com/resources/pdf/webIpswitch0310INCMABO.pdf

A few weeks ago I discovered a game called “Words with Friends”. It is just like scrabble except that you can have multiple games running at once.  You can play random opponents or play against your friends and you make your moves at your leisure. I find this game to be highly addictive.  So, I have convinced myself that the game helps exercise the brain as well as assist in learning new words.

Last Sunday after making a move I received an “oops” screen.  Having seen this before I assumed that a reinstall was probably in order.  I then did all of the following: uninstall/reinstall, search the web for known issues, submit “another” support ticket…you get the picture. The next day it was still crashing and I was going through withdrawal symptoms.

In my mind, I had paid $2.99 for this app so they better fix it! (Okay, so $2.99 isn’t much money, but when most apps are $.99 this game was pretty expensive by comparison. The mindset is this: if you pay for an app, you expect that app to work.)  Fast forward to Thursday…still no response from the company and my app was still busted. I decided to take the next step and see if Twitter could be useful in this instance.  I tweeted my irritation with the game in 140 characters (that was difficult to do), and sent a direct tweet to the company’s account.  Even with a small Twitter following I found that someone re-tweeted my post within minutes saying they were having the same problem. A few minutes later, I got a mention from the company with a support email address.  I sent an email to them explaining my problem, and within another few minutes I had five emails stating my support cases had been updated.  The company evidently reset something in my account and had me reinstall the game (again), and suddenly it quit crashing!  Within a couple hours of tweeting about the issue the company had fixed the problem and squashed my four days of frustration.

On a positive note, it was refreshing to see another company following the social media sites to see what people are saying about their product.  However, on the flip side, they seem to be solely relying on social media to hear from their customers and have seemingly ignored their own traditional support system. I do feel that social media has its place, but I don’t think you should rely on social media as your only avenue to get input from your customers.   So this raises a question:  If a person not using Twitter encounters this problem, how will they get resolution? Will they get resolution, or will they just become a customer of some other gaming company?

I have more thoughts on the whole idea of customer service – I will write about those in a few days.

So do we need to detox from our inbox? Or are we just becoming incredibly effective at multi-tasking?

There is no doubt that the ability to stay connected to email via mobile device is extremely useful.  Any mail server worth their weight in gold enables mobile synchronization.  It’s become an expectation, not just a feature.  And for good reason. We can respond quickly, collaborate from remote locations and stay connected to our calendars, tasks and contacts at all times.  Many would argue that mobile messaging is business critical.  According to Osterman, “…this year’s study finds that employees rely so heavily on mobile e-mail availability that if service went down, even for an hour, 85 percent of respondents indicated that it would impact their business work flow.”

It’s an invaluable convenience.  No doubt.  But how do we prevent too much of a good thing?  The definition of compulsion is an irresistible persistent impulse to perform an act such as excessive hand washing (or in this case checking your email).  If you find yourself at your daughter’s wedding hiding behind the ice sculpture with your Blackberry or driving 12 miles out of town during the family trip to Big Bear Mountain just to make sure that contract came in from your vendor…..you might have reached the point of compulsion.  It’s time to put down the phone, set your email auto-responder and enjoy a little time off.  Hey, there’s always the car ride home…if you’re not the one driving of course.

So I’m looking at status updates yesterday and my friend says that her crops are going to die because she’s giving up Facebook for Lent.  This just speaks to the addiction that is social media these days.  Keeping up with the constant feeds, links, threads, updates, notifications, farms, zoos….it’s all become too much for the average person.  So it’s not surprising that the current focus in the industry is consolidation.

Enter Google.   Their latest answer to our overwhelming communication woes is Google Buzz.   Now, unlike many other bloggers out there, I’m not even going to touch the issue of Google’s “auto-follow” option or the impending privacy issues that they face.  I’ve read countless articles over the last few days and it appears that Google is on top of the matter.  HUGE faux pas but enough is enough already.  Moving on….

My main issue is this incessant need to combine all things communication into one platform.  WHY???  I’m all for the convenience of a “one-stop-shop” but that’s not always the answer.  Case in point…every morning I put on 4 different types of lotion.  Why?  Because each one serves its own purpose for the different parts of my body.  One lotion just wouldn’t meet all of my needs.  In my mind, it’s the same with communication.  Trying to force a one-stop solution ignores the complexity of communication altogether.   And that’s what Google has done.

My relationships (business, family, friends, acquaintances, or classmates) are all different.  So it only makes sense that how I correspond with them and what I share with them will vary.  It can be personal, business, private, public, quick, lengthy, asynchronous or synchronous.  For some, I use email.  For others it’s FB or Twitter, a phone call or text or even… (gasp) face-to-face.  Would just one of those work for you in all cases?  Do you want your business contacts to see what you ate for dinner last night in one minute and receive a contract proposal from you the next?  If something is completely public, can it also be secure?

I’m not saying that communication overload isn’t an issue.  There are millions of people, myself included, that are feeling overwhelmed with the excess of information and messages to sort through on a daily basis.  But I am not of the mindset that the answer is one tool.  I use email for specific reasons and I use social media for an entirely different set of reasons.  Likewise, I have personal email and business email.  I have a work Twitter account and a private Facebook account.  They are purposely kept separate.  And I don’t think I’m alone in that.

So rather than trying to pigeon hole a number of tools into one, doesn’t it make more sense to think about how to improve the information flow within existing platforms?  Email will never be Twitter and vice versa and that’s ok.   They have separate reasons-for-being.  So how do we work smarter within each tool to keep from drowning in a sea of messages?  Better filtering? More customized information streams?  And how can the different tools be flexible enough to interact with each other without jeopardizing security?

What are your thoughts? What’s working for you? What’s not?  Do you see a “Wal-mart” in the future for communication?

New Scientist. Well, that’s their claim anyway.  But I disagree.  They report that a group of computer scientists have claimed to develop an “effectively perfect” method for blocking spam. YAWN. Same story. Different writer. Different day. Fact is by the time I started researching this “new” method, Amir Lev, CTO at Commtouch had already blogged it and effectively said, “kudos guys…you invented what we’ve been doing all along.”

The magic behind Commtouch is RPD. RPD stands for Recurrent Pattern Detection.  In layman’s terms: the technology identifies and classifies message patterns.  It analyzes massive amounts of traffic in real time; searches for patterns that will classify a message as spam and then using that information it identifies malicious messages and blocks them from your inbox, all within minutes of an outbreak.  RPD blocks 98% of spam and maintains a tiny false positive level.

In a nutshell, it all boils down to your reputation. If you send relevant mail from your server you maintain a good reputation. You start sending irrelevant mail and you develop a bad reputation. Once that bad reputation is in place you get blacklisted and now you have extra work on your hands.

I remember when I was in college. I had the reputation of being an outdoorsy guy who spent more time on his mountain bike in the woods than in the classroom. When people wanted a great place to hike or ride…they would call me for advice. If they needed advice on physics or molecular biology they called…well…anyone but me. Why? Because I had ZERO credibility in that area. Your reputation attracts a specific niche audience. Commtouch’s reputation speaks for itself and that is part of the reason we’re a satisfied business partner with them. The New Scientist? Well…I’ll just leave that there.

As for spam? We don’t like it. We don’t ask for it. It’s effectively a pain and a nuisance. But there are some solid anti-spam solutions available. We chose Commtouch because of the reputation of their technology, its ease-of-use, and affordability. The solution you choose needs to meet your specific needs as well as provide you with rock-solid protection. I am interested though…what solutions are you using? How are you using them? How effective are they? How much maintenance is required on your part? Leave your comments below.

Social responsibility is core to the values of Ipswitch and its employees.  In response to the devastating crisis in Haiti last week, Ipswitch has activated an online donation center through CARE, one of the world’s largest private international humanitarian organizations.  As Haiti continues to experience powerful aftershocks, the need for support continues to grow.

Please join us in supporting the Haitian relief efforts by making a $10 donation to CARE through our online donation center.  Donating is quick, easy and secure.  And no purchase of an Ipswitch product is necessary to donate.

To learn more about CARE and their efforts in Haiti, please visit their website: http://www.care.org/emergency/haitiearthquake/index.asp.

To learn more about iCare@IPSWITCH and our philanthropy efforts, please visit the iCare@IPSWITCH website: http://icare.ipswitch.com/index.asp

It’s been a mere 10 years since the famed Y2K bug threatened to end the world.  It seems like just yesterday that we all waited with baited breath to see how computer systems would shift from 1999 to 2000.  Gas was $1.26 per gallon, a U.S. stamp cost 33 cents and AOL combined with Time Warner.  We all felt relief that year as the millennium bug scare, that was thought to cause computer systems all over the world to fail, ended with minimal glitches.  Crisis averted.

Here we are 10 years later….gas is up to $2.60 per gallon, a U.S. stamp costs 44 cents and AOL and Time Warner are through.  And once again, news of the next Y2K bug spreads…this time dubbed the Y2K10 bug.  While this bug didn’t get anywhere near the attention that its predecessor did, it still caused significant damage.  The following Commtouch blog post goes into more detail about the bug but basically what happened is this….SpamAssassin, an open source mail filter has a rule in place that checks to see if a message is sent from the “far future.”  Now, it may be difficult for you and I to remember back when 2010 was considered the “far future” but it was and based on this rule, all messages with 2010 in the date header were given an increased spam weight which has now resulted in false positives and the rejection of legitimate emails.  This is major issue considering how critical email is to all of us, particularly in business.   Commtouch reports that the bug had a significant impact on the ratio of false positives, topping almost 20%.

SpamAssassin has issued an update to fix the bug but as Commtouch notes, the rule was changed to flag messages after 2020 so this bug could rear its ugly head once more for SpamAssassin users in the “far future” if they aren’t careful.

For a real-time spam outbreak monitor from Commtouch, check out http://www.imailserver.com/resources/spam-stats.asp

In August 2008 I wrote a very brief blog post entitled, “What does your email address say about you?” You can go there and read (if you like)…but the quick and dirty on it is this: 3 researchers from the University of Leipzig conducted some research to determine any correlations between an individual’s personality and their email address. Well, not their entire email address…just the first part of it (AKA: the local-part). Now, almost a year and a half later, here I am talking about the “other” part of the email address – the hostname. And, I am asking the same question, “What does your email address say about you?”

First and foremost, I am a marketer and I am looking at this topic from a marketing perspective. So, maybe a better question to ask is, “What does your email address say about your business?”

The fact of the matter is that the typical email user does not care about the technical aspects of mail delivery. Most do not even commit your email address to memory. And why should they? Our email clients auto-fill addresses, we all have digital address books, and we reply to more email than we generate.  So, other than ensuring proper delivery to the intended recipient, does an email address have any significance at all? I would say that it does, especially for those of us in business.

On my desk is a stack of business cards I collected from a trade show. There are 53 cards in that stack to be exact. All of those cards have the person’s email address clearly printed alongside their contact information. The general construct of those email addresses are some variation of their first and last names for the local-part and then followed by their business domain for the hostname. We’ve come to expect that as standard practice for business email, right? Well, there is this ONE card in that stack that is different. This company chose to use their business name as the local-part and “Hotmail.com” as their hostname. Their business card is of equal weight as the others. It shares the same aesthetic qualities as the rest. However, there is a drain on its legitimacy because the email address does not match their company URL. I know it may seem minor. But, from a marketing perspective this is a lost opportunity to remind these potential customers of your brand.

Your brand is the image of your product or service in the market. Your brand image is both experiential and psychological. The market experiences your brand through the products and services you provide. But, the market also engages your brand expecting that it will align with all the advertising muscle you’ve put behind it. The last thing you want your brand to do is suffer. Given the fact that email remains the most critical application for small-to-mid sized businesses, why would we not make every effort to ensure that our email address is part of our brand management strategy?

So, what does your email address say about you? Better yet…what does it say about your brand management?

Hopefully it says good things. My random collection of cards shows that 52 out of 53 businesses are doing it right. But, what if your business is like the one mentioned earlier? What should you do? The good news is that it is a fairly simple fix. All you need is an email server.

Email servers vary as much in function as they do in price. If brand management is your primary objective then remember that you do not need a beast of a machine and you do not need to spend a lot of money to get yourself up and going. One FREE solution is IMail Express. It handles all of your email, supports up to 10 users, and runs on modest hardware.

Having an email server, whether it is a hosted solution or something you maintain in your office, should not intimidate you. Most vendors have taken their time to think about their customer’s needs and to create very intuitive administrative controls. Not to mention, in the case of IMail Express, for just $99.00 you can have access to 12 months of unlimited technical support.

Bringing this back to your brand…with little-to-no out of pocket expense you can quickly adjust your brand management strategy to include the use of your business’ email hostname. This increases the subtle psychological impact of your brand and brings you one step closer to setting the proper expectations for your product or service.

Who doesn’t want the big dog in their corner?  The big dog is a safe bet.  Safer than backing the little guy, that’s for sure.  Let’s face it….not many of us would have put our money on David over Goliath.  Backing the “little guy” is risky on any level but particularly in business when there are financial and personnel investments at stake.  But the fact that you have so much invested in your business is the reason why it is so important to question whether or not the “big dog” option is the right one for you.

When choosing a mail server, reputation can be an important factor in the purchase process.  But it’s not the only factor, particularly for small to medium size businesses, where IT investments of any size have a major impact on the bottom line.  In the current economy, even larger companies are starting to take a closer look at their software solutions and finding that enterprise solutions are not right for every organization.

Companies of all sizes use Microsoft as their predominant vendor for IT solutions (Windows, Office, etc.).  And many just assume that they should follow suit with their email server, believing that Exchange is the obvious, if not only choice.  While it is without question that Microsoft Exchange is the industry standard for mail servers, it may not be the right solution for your small to medium size business.

Exchange is an enterprise solution which means that it is designed specifically for large organizations.  And the mindset that most people have about smaller mail servers is that they don’t have the capability to service thousands of user mailboxes.  But in fact, most can.  Several have the same horsepower and robust features as the enterprise solutions.  But the difference is that they are designed to operate in a smaller business environment meaning that less of your company’s resources are required to install, set up and maintain the server.

There are several Exchange alternatives in the marketplace today worth considering.  If you haven’t already taken the time to research them, do so.  And keep the following points in mind to maximize your search:

Cost – A lower cost doesn’t necessarily mean fewer features.  You don’t have to settle for just basic email functionality with a smaller mail server.  Most come equipped with or have the option to add premium features such as anti-spam and anti-virus protection, collaboration, archiving, mobile synchronization, web access, etc.   All of this is still at a fraction of the Exchange cost.  Do the research and make sure that the value of every dollar you spend is maximized on the features that are critical to your business.

Maintenance – If you’re looking for a solution that is easy to use and requires little to no maintenance, Exchange is probably not the option for you.  Evaluate your choices – How quick is the install?  Is the UI intuitive?  What technical support is available? How difficult is migration and is assistance offered?  Make sure the option you choose won’t burden you or your staff with maintenance issues at any point in the process.

Compatibility – For many users that are contemplating whether or not to drop Exchange, losing Outlook as a mail client is a concern.  However, most of the smaller email servers are compatible with Outlook and other popular email clients, satisfying the end users as well as the admin.

Scalability – The system you choose should fit the size of your business and be flexible as your organization expands or contracts.  Particularly for the small to medium businesses, it’s important to find a messaging solution that can grow with you as your business grows.

Ross Brocato, Corporate Systems Administrator for PHNS, a provider of IT solutions for the healthcare industry, found these tips to be helpful in his quest for a mail server.  Brocato’s primary requirements were finding a server that was able to connect a contracted workforce dispersed across the globe and maintaining impressive cost-savings for his business partners.   Brocato’s search ultimately led him to Ipswitch IMail Server because of its ease-of-use and flexibility to set up new accounts which was critical for their constantly changing workforce.  Brocato states “IMail Server doesn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach, but rather spends the extra time to understand the business need fulfilled by technology.”  (To view the full PHNS case study, visit the following link: http://www.imailserver.com/resources/case-studies/phns.html )

The point is this…bigger doesn’t always mean better.  Before you choose a mail server for your business, consider the size of your business and determine what your specific needs are.   Finding a solution that is designed to fit your business could save your organization valuable time and money.

The agreement allows Ipswitch IMail Server to directly synchronize e-mail and data between mobile devices utilizing Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync technology. The Exchange ActiveSync protocol enables mobile client devices to synchronize e-mail messages, calendar items, contacts, task lists and other mailbox data with IMail Server.

“Ipswitch released the first version of IMail Server 15 years ago. Since that time the landscape and architecture of the messaging market has changed dramatically,” said Tripp Allen, president of Ipswitch Messaging Division. “Today’s market requires real time access to your data. This agreement is not just about maintaining our competitive edge within that market. Rather, it is the right step in giving our customers the mobility they require and providing them the reliability they have come to trust with all of Ipswitch Messaging products.”

Microsoft has been licensing the Exchange ActiveSync protocol for mobile devices since 2003 and Ipswitch Messaging Division joins an elite list of companies licensing the Exchange ActiveSync patents for implementation on a server.

“Microsoft’s patented Exchange ActiveSync technology is becoming the standard for mobile communication, and this licensing program allows companies like Ipswitch to enhance their value proposition to their customers,” said David Kaefer, general manager of Intellectual Property Licensing at Microsoft “We’re pleased to work with Ipswitch as they continue to deliver innovative services to customers via their messaging software.”

About Ipswitch Messaging Division

Ipswitch Messaging Division delivers crucial communication and collaboration tools without the high acquisition and ongoing administrative costs of systems designed for large enterprises. Millions of people worldwide use Ipswitch Messaging software to communicate via the award-winning Ipswitch IMail Server and Ipswitch Instant Messaging.  Along with an integrated Commtouch Anti-Spam technology, Ipswitch Messaging delivers secure anti-virus protection from BitDefender.   Ipswitch IMail Server is designed for companies that want a turnkey collaboration system that includes e-mail, features that plug into Microsoft® Outlook®, plus integrated anti-spam and anti-virus support and an appealing, secure instant-messaging capability all in one server. IMail Server delivers a collaborative set of core features and full-fledged groupware products like its enterprise counterparts at a fraction of the cost.  Supported by a world-class team of technical support engineers and customer service representatives, Ipswitch Messaging stands ready to apply its development know-how to help make your organization’s messaging initiative a total success.

For product and sales information, visit http://www.imailserver.com. Ipswitch values community involvement; visit http://icare.ipswitch.com to find out how to become involved.

More information about Microsoft’s licensing programs is available at www.microsoft.com/iplicensing.