We have been doing an amazing amount of work to bring more stability to our Exchange 2007 network. While the Exchange 2010 network has been far better performance & stability-wise than we expected, the Exchange 2007 side has been disappointing for both us and our clients. We have redesigned our mailbox role deployments and topology, which we will begin putting into production starting with this weekend.

On Sunday, August 22nd 9 PM Central through Monday, August 23rd 9 AM Central, we will be making significant updates to the Exchange 2007 storage systems behind our SCROOGE and HUEY networks. We believe these performance enhancements will significantly improve reliability, performance and our ability to scale with the client demand on these networks.

We will continue to evaluate the systems and perform upgrades to the additional networks.

I must admit that we have heard your frustration with the DEWEY servers, Exchange 2007 and Blackberry. I apologize for that. What I can tell you though is that we have been working at a completely new level on redesigning our platform and addressing the concerns that you have brought. Unfortunately the changes we need to implement can only be done gradually and are not possible for an overnight process.

We believe that the upgrades we are planning will deliver a new level of performance. In the meantime, the mailbox role changes we are planning for this Sunday evening will interrupt your access to your mailbox (even though the servers will appear to be online). While Sunday is our least busy day, we know that many of you work around the clock and even a scheduled maintenance interval can interrupt your business. If that is the case, please make sure you can access your LiveArchive account at https://livearchive.exchangedefender.com.

We’re growing, again, and that means more IP addresses and more networks. We expect a new growth bump to require additional hardware that will be added during Q1 and Q2 of this year so please keep an eye on this page.

Moving & Maintenance on mail1.ownwebnow.com

Our shared mail hosting infrastructure is moving. We’re going from 65.99.192.2 to 65.99.255.2. With the additional bandwidth and carriers, the network change will speed up the response time and transfer on larger attachments.

If you have your DNS record managed by us, there is nothing to worry about. We’ll take care of it.

If you have your DNS record managed externally, and have records that point to 65.99.192.2 manually – you will need to make changes. Since we don’t know where your record is or if you aren’t using us (you should be, that’s the assumed operational state) there is no way for us to notify you beyond this blog post so make sure that you make the change ASAP. The IP address at 65.99.192.2 will cease to operate Monday, January 25th, 2010.

We have a scheduled maintenance window at 10 PM EST on Thursday, January 21st, during which time there will only be intermittent access to our mail infrastructure.

ExchangeDefender SPF records

If you are using SPF records as a part of your domain name to limit joe-job’s and spoofing you’re probably aware of having to manually add IP addresses to it when a new ExchangeDefender outbound network is created. Good news – you don’t have to do it manually any more! Just add the following directive to your SPF record (in bold):

“v-spf1 include:exchangedefender.com –all”

Adding the include:exchangedefender.com to your SPF TXT field will include all of the defined outbound SMTP servers used by ExchangeDefender so you don’t have to manage them manually. Naturally, you should also list all of your other SMTP servers that relay mail for your domain. Note: ExchangeDefender does not offer technical support for SPF records as they are not a part of our service. However, if you wish to use them and know how to implement them, ExchangeDefender is making it easier to track our records.

As noted previously (and discussed in our portal, conference call and newsletters) the enhanced SMTP security policies are now in place. Going forward, all SMTP traffic on our networks (inbound and outbound) will have to pass through ExchangeDefender in order to reach it’s target server. This network change affects all servers and all networks controlled by Own Web Now Corp.

If you have a requirement for plain SMTP connectivity for mail relay please either consider establishing a VPN directly to your server (if you are a dedicated/virtual customer) or upgrade to Microsoft Outlook and use RPC-over-HTTPS proxy available for our hosting customers. If you require SMTP for your client needs (Thunderbird, Outlook Express) please use SMTP-over-SSL (TLS) in your setup.

Despite enhancements in the security products and reduced cost of antivirus products, SMTP based attacks have continued to rise through 2009. We are committed to protecting our customers and limiting exposure that comes with an open SMTP port.

Effective July 1st, 2009 we will no longer accept anonymous or plain text SMTP connections on our ExchangeDefender network. If you are using the SMTP protocol to connect to the Hosted Exchange please switch them to MAPI or RPC over HTTPS. If you have limitations requiring you to continue using SMTP, please note that you will only be able to connect to the servers using SMTP over SSL.

Again: No port 25 connectivity will be alllowed starting July 1st. This change affects Exchange 2007 network only, we will issue separate alerts for Exchange 2003 network, Zimbra network and our Virtual Hosting SMTP mail later next quarter.

This change is a part of our effort to improve the security of the network and eliminate direct connections by SPAM bots. Please stay tuned to this blog, one of the major areas of focus next quarter is improvement of overall security and controls on the ever-growing OWN network.

We are running a new promotion on Blackberry services, courtesy of RIM. You can choose from two options:

$99 setup, $10 /month.

or

$49 setup, $15/month.

This is in addition to the fees related to Exchange hosting. As usual, volume discounts apply, if you have over 100 seats we can reduce the pricing significantly.

This is a limited time promotion courtesy of RIM for new BES accounts only.

Over the past few months the AhSay Offsite Backup and Replication service has surpassed our stability expectations and we are considering offering it as a managed service through our partners. Currently, AhSay is the solution we use in-house on all our servers for georedundant backups and we also offer it at cost to our partner base (at cost = your technical support comes directly from AhSay). We have met many of you that would like an additional tier, one at which we take care of all the backups and the logistics.

Here is what we are currently considering:

• Agents customized, branded and installed on the clients server(s)
• Advanced configuration support for multiple backup sets against the same username/password set
• Failed backup management (find out why backup failed, trigger a manual backup, fix the problem if possible)
• Monthly, quarterly or annual offsite data hardcopy
• Quota management and upgrades

From our support tracking on offsite backup, and your feedback, we have concluded that these are the biggest pain points you are currently experiencing and we would like to help. The data hardcopy involves shipping a hard drive with all the offsite data at a set interval, for example, we could ship a 250GB USB drive every quarter at a cost of $300 and let the client keep it in their safety deposit box. In terms of quota management, we can tell when the data is growing very closely to the quota limit and will ask for upgrade (or automatic upgrade permission, within reason) so that backup jobs do not fail. Finally, log troubleshooting and backup job adjustment – when it fails find out why it happened and fix it.

We are not ready to announce the pricing yet but this will not be at-cost product, it would be a full service product.

It is important to note that we still do not expect to offer this service as a retail product to be purchased off our web site, it is still going to be a partner-sold service. The reasoning behind this is that as good as we are at running the infrastructure we do not have the bandwidth to discuss the clients disaster recovery needs and requirements, their business continuity schedule or the amount of data that should be held offsite.

The partner response to our new data protection service has been simply incredible. As a result the amount of bandwidth and storage we are in process of allocating to it is equally enterprising.

We are expanding SAN and network allocation to our public AhSay servers. As a result you will likely experience some performance issues until the new storage systems are in place and the additional bandwidth is brought online. This will not affect your daily backup processes dramatically as the AhSay agent is set to automatically retry/resume as availability changes.

We expect the work on our storage networks to be complete by early Friday AM, EST; 9/26/2007. We’re sorry about any inconvenience this may cause you.