ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 Addin has been released and is available for immediate download at www.exchangedefender.com. We have designed this new software to help you interact with the ExchangeDefender security service without leaving the comfort of your Microsoft Outlook 2007 interface. No more waiting for reports, no more trying to guess the ExchangeDefender portal password, no more hunting for statistics or forwarding SPAM - we have simplified the whole process of interacting with the service that keeps your mailbox clean.

• What can you do with ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 Addin? Just about everything you can do from the web portal!
• You can view the realtime SPAM and SureSPAM quarantines right in your Outlook at a click of a button.
• Manage your trusted senders list.
• Quickly locate messages by searching for subject or sender.
• Report SPAM to improve filtering or send email to our team for troubleshooting.
• View domain statistics and see what ExchangeDefender is doing.

Of course, every aspect of the software is brandable to reflect your corporate image, we’ve even included documentation templates that you can use to inform your users of this new solution that is provided at no additional cost!

As many of you are well aware Own Web Now Corp global network operation center (NOC) is based in Dallas, TX. Today will be the most significant test of our network infrastructure impact due to inclement weather. Hurricane Ike is posed to hit Dallas, TX with the eye going directly overhead:

Our network operations center is staffed 24/7/365 and today is no exception. We are staffed better than usual for the Saturday’s 2nd and 3rd shift to monitor and manage any unusual events that may come as a result of Hurricane Ike. We do not expect significant network or wind damage as the data centers we operate from are standalone structures with poured cement and among the most element-proof buildings available.

What we are curious to find out is the state of flooding and power. Below is the map of our neighborhood.

The areas in blue represent our data centers and the big blue block in the center is our global network operations center at 1950 N Stemmons Frwy, also known as Infomart. All our data centers are well above the ground and can easily sustain several feet of water without impacting network operations.

Our primary concern is with the proximity of the Trinity River which is one of the largest public works in the history of Dallas and also the main flood protection solution for the Dallas-Fort Worth area. All the green “rivers” you see on the picture above are part of the Trinity River Corridor Project designed to take excess rainwater and guide it away from the sensitive downtown Dallas area. This system has never been tested by as large of a hurricane as Ike and we anxiously await to see how everything plays out. None of the diesel generators or operations are even close to the ground, and the lowest point of entry is some 8′ feet off the ground.

We are also anxious to see the performance of the new electrical grid monitoring service recently deployed in Dallas. You can read more about this system at The Dallas Morning News:

In February, an Oncor engineer, using the new technology, noticed unusual grid activity.

A worker went to the problem spot, noticed a loose bolt at a power line connection and tightened it.

Without the new technology, Oncor wouldn’t have known about the loose bolt until it fell off, power went out, and a customer called to complain.

We look forward to the test of Managed Power As A Service.

Given the fears and uncertainties we are very confident in our choice of Dallas as the headquarters for Own Web Now Corp. Every geographic location has its geopolitical uncertainties and tradeoffs and we feel that Dallas offers the best mix of corporate friendliness, network availability and redundancy, skilled workforce and reliable utilities. We are confident with our choice and our thoughts and prayers are with our fellow Texans this weekend as we weather this storm. After all, god blessed Texas

Sincerely,

Samantha Ellison

Chief of Operations, Own Web Now Corp

It gives me great pleasure to announce that we have completed the upgrades to our global offsite backup network this weekend and that all the new features are now online. Make sure to take a moment and download the latest agents to take advantage of all the new awesome things our systems are able to do for you.

Continuous Data Protection

The absolutely coolest, most profitable and most desired feature available in the new release is the continuous data protection. This feature allows the backup software to make snapshots of data as it is being changed on the users PC or on the server. Backup jobs can now be executed in 1 minute increments if necessary.

Why is this absolutely phenomenal for you? Because it ope s up a profitability margin in the solution that nobody else can compete with you. For example, one of our competitors in this space requires you to purchase expensive hardware to do CDP, to pay for it up front and to pay for offsite backup quota as well. Not with Own Web Now - there is just one monthly fee, allowing you to choose your own hardware, even the affordable network-enabled USB hard drives from Western Digital MyBook Series (750GB market price around $200).

Another one of our competitors in the SMB space has a requirement ratio, so you have to buy far more offsite backup space than you actually need. Offsite backups are for critical documents, but what about a competitive advantage of having more robust, local backups? Well, that doesn’t make sense for them because they don’t make money. With Own Web Now there are no offsite/onsite ratios, you can start with our lowest plan (10GB offsite, $16/month) and install the agent software on all the office PCs and create local backups with CDP for every workstation in the company.

We are absolutely thrilled with this new feature!

Seeding

Starting with September 1st, we now offer seeding services for $100. If you have a client that has a ton of data to offsite or you just don’t want to tie up their Internet connection for the weekend we now offer the ability to seed the backup and bring it over. This has been a huge area of discontent for our users with larger backup sets, that it sometimes took forever to get initial backup to Own Web Now and then random failures and expirations didn’t quite line up.

So let’s say goodbye to all those problems. Here is how this works. When you order the offsite backup let us know that you want to send us a backup on a hard drive. We will UPS you a hard drive to plug into your server/workstation and save a backup on the hard drive. Put the USB drive into the included envelope and give it to your UPS guy. It will arrive at Own Web Now Dallas or Los Angeles NOC in a day or two, we’ll restore it and from that point it’s just your daily changes being pushed over the Internet.

Brand New Interface

The interface in the new agent is stunning, on par with the competitive backup solutions. I think you will really enjoy it.

Advertising Support

Never miss an opportunity to market to your own clients. With the new release we will accept ads that can be displayed to your own user base. Since the agents can be installed on multiple PCs this gives you more exposure than just your logo!

I sincerely hope that the new agent gives many of you not just a more remarkable offsite and onsite backup solution, but also provides you with the profitability margin that nobody can compete with you on.

Effective tomorrow, August 14th, 2008, we will no longer offer competitive transfer promotions for service providers who switched their accounts from Postini/Google, MX Logic or Message Labs to ExchangeDefender.

Over the past few days we have missed our SLA on a number of support requests in the support queue, order queue and maintenance queues. An upgrade to the support portal on July 10th included a new algorithm for privacy control and support request routing, meant to allow for different types of support requests to be entered into the system but not visible to the entire staff. Accounting would see accounting requests, Support would see support requests, Executives would see executive requests and so on. In process of enabling the SLA against the requests we improperly routed a number of requests to the executive queue which was not monitored from Friday until today. We have addressed and corrected the issue and are moving the tickets and responding to them as fast as possible.

If you experienced an issue that was reported through our support system and was not answered in a timely manner we apologize and promise to have all support requests addressed today. Thank you for your patience.

We have completed the rollout of PHP 5.1.6 scripting language on our clustered web hosting platform. PHP 5.1.6 is our first upgrade from PHP 4.x and opens up a new world of possibilities for our partners and customers to utilize many open source and commercial web applications free of charge on top of their web hosting accounts.

Join Vlad Mazek, Own Web Now Corp CEO for a chat with Karl Palachuk of KP Enterprises at about noon today (Eastern -5:00 GMT) for a discussion about SMB technology and where OWN solutions fit in it as well as the road ahead:

Wednesday, March 26th
9:00 AM Pacific Time Zone, Noon EST
- Dial (319) 279-1000 (U.S. phone number)
- Your participant passcode is 1024518.
- This call is limited to the first 300 attendees.

Generally we reserve network events and alerts for our Network Operations site but the volume of support regarding this single issue has prompted us to post it here. I hope you are not offended by the technical information regarding a third party service that may not affect you.

In the old, dark ages of Internet when ExchangeDefender grew out of the primordial stew, people used connection-based filtering to blindly reject content using nothing but faith in the independent listing service. One of the popular realtime blacklists (RBL) was ORDB and it was a database of mail servers that were open relays. These servers could be used by anyone, without authentication of any sort, to send SPAM content all over the Internet.

In December of 2006, ORDB went offline.

On the morning of March 25, 2008 relays.ordb.org came back online, blacklisting everything. How, why, when and so on are not important, the only relevant task here is to stop using this RBL. If you receive the following context error, the remote server is still using ORDB to detect SPAM and it is dropping all your inbound mail:

The e-mail system was unable to deliver the message, but did not report a specific reason. Check the address and try again. If it still fails, contact your system administrator.

< outbound.exchangedefender.com #5.0.0 SMTP; 530 Recipient refused. Open relay found, refer to http://www.ordb.org/lookup/?host=65.99.192.91>”

If you use Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 you can quickly remove ORDB from your RBL query list by opening up Exchange System Manager, navigating to Global Settings, right clicking on Message Delivery and selecting properties. On the Connection Filtering tab you will find the RBLs you currently query. If you are protected by ExchangeDefender, this list should be blank. If you use a mail server other than Exchange consult your vendor.

I hope you have a wonderful day and thank you for letting us manage your SPAM so you don’t have to deal with the above every day Thank you for your business.

Vlad Mazek

The other day someone asked how do we decide what goes on the Network Operations page, which is due for a big overhaul in the month of March based on everything we have learned so far. How do we figure out if something is important enough to put something there you ask? Very simple:

If an issue is affecting more than 10 customers, or more than one server, it gets posted.

If an issue is likely to affect more than 10 customers, or more than one server, it gets posted.

Simple enough. We are a partner company, we are an extension of their business that provides essential Internet services. As that extention, our duty is to communicate to our partners and our clients when things are different than usual. We have found that it is more effective in terms of providing timely support, that it is far easier for the clients to be aware of what may be going on so when they are asked for support they can be fully informed of any service issues.

The site has been very successful, it has contributed to a huge decrease in support requests and consequently savings for everyone involved because we are all that much more efficient. There has been only one negative comment so far, “I want all my information on one page, I don’t want to have to look at three pages to find all my Own Web Now information!” While we can understand the concern, this is a problem that technology has already fixed, people no longer surf the Internet. People subscribe to the data feeds that go on their desktop, portal, SharePoint, you name it. If you are actively seeking out information, instead of letting information come to you in the fastest and most efficient way possible, it’s time to learn about blog aggregators.

If your mail server ever goes down, ExchangeDefender automatically spools messages for it and delivers them when the server connection is restored. Because the delivery is staggered (we don’t fire a thousand connections to your server the moment it boots up) it can take over an hour to deliver spooled messages that have been stored due to an outage that lasted over an hour.

By default, we keep these messages for an interval of five (5) days, but since we are based in the southern United States and prone to hurricanes, flash floods, tornados and other inclement weather (one DC even got hit by a earthquake this year) we tend to extend the spooling period on ExchangeDefender from June through November of each year to 14 days. Last year, in light of many of our customers in the northwest suffering from ice/snow storms, we extended this period through January.

This is a notice that our mail spooling will revert back to 5 day interval on February 1st, 2008 and we will extend it back to 14 days starting June 1st, 2008. Email spooling is an automatic low-level process, that has since been supplemented by the free ExchangeDefender LiveArchive service. The two are meant to be used in conjunction to provide full business continuity and guard against less-than-reliable Internet connections.

As usual, thank you for your business.