I'll keep publishing

I was just reading this Ferris piece on Exchange mailbox sizes and thought it would be useful to document Cleartext’s strategy for our hosted email clients storage. The Ferris article starts;

‘Exchange 2010’s database strategy is very interesting. The new Database Availability Groups and the benefits they offer for data protection and quick recovery are striking.

Overall, Microsoft is optimistic that mailboxes will be able to grow to 10GB or more. However, it’s unclear how large mailboxes will perform in practice. Several concerns spring to mind:’  read more…

We (Cleartext) offer both mailbox hosting (via an Axigen ISP platform) and SaaS email archiving.

Our strategy is to keep hosted mailboxes as low as 200-500Mb and bundle these mailboxes with the SaaS archiving service for permanent email storage. This has several advantages;

1) Users mailboxes are easier to manage and migrate if needed and are less prone to data loss caused by IT systems issues or more often ‘user error’.

2) The SaaS archive has full text and attachment indexing meaning it’s quicker and easy to find email when needed.

3) The client can implement their retention policy on the SaaS platform to ensure compliance with eDiscovery regulations. Avoiding issues where staff delete email from their inbox.

This is a change to the usual large mailbox offerings from organisation slike Google but we believe is more appropriate for business deployments.

We had a glorious weekend and I actually managed to avoid doing any work, well all but 30 minutes.

I also managed to order replacement wing mirrors for my Rover, someone managed to clip the drivers side mirror while it was parked so it’s a good reason to buy two new ones.

Bob: I’m in the office, best way to get me is IM
Alice: you are not on sametime
Bob: No, why would I be on a proprietary IM network which locks me into chatting to people on that network only

Reminds me of early AOL and CompuServe (RIP), why do we still have large ‘walled garden’ IM networks?

Why?

I thought I should go and take a look at Bing. So, what test should I set, I know, search for ‘managed email security’ with ’show all’ selected.

Surprise! ClearEmail comes out on top as the first non sponsored link, well done Microsoft, now all I need is everyone looking for managed email security to click on it 

Inevitable. Twitters blog about this.

Sophos covering this and more.

Testing the Wordpress Prologue theme

The article linked below should demonstrate a good enough reason to use an enterprise IM platform rather than public IM. Apart from the levels of ’security’ offered by each public IM network it’s fairly obvious from the embedded chart that your conversations may not be very private…

How safe is instant messaging? A security and privacy survey

Fifteen years ago a young anti-virus industry thought it was cool to have little graphics displaying viruses, then we all grew up and realised enterprise security professionals want trustworthy sensible people looking after their systems. Imagine my laughter when I spotted these on a vendors web site. (lets ignore the flaky description of a virus)

Whilst building a new site using Joomla 1.5 I needed to display an RSS feed icon without text, unfortunately the standard mod_syndicate module doesn’t let me save the ‘Text’ Module Parameter empty, it defaults to ‘Feed Entries’.My fix was to edit the default.php file in /modules/mod_syndicate/tmpl/ and remove the code that display this text. this gives the following result.

No doubt kicked off when PDF spam started arriving in out inboxes PDFAssassin attempts to scan PDF files for ’spammyness’ and adds the Spam Assissin score;

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfassassin/

Had an issue today with spam filters blocking legit emails and it turns out that it was because the sender was spoofing the ‘from’ address. I suspect this is common when web based apps get http servers like Apache to send out form data via email. Some quick reads here; http://www.tracyphillips.com/2007/05/21/sendmail-x-authentication-warning/

We soft launched a new service this week, ClearEmail EDM ‘Outbound Email Campaign Management’. This service complements our inbound email filtering and content control (which also has outbound mail control). Our one paragraph description goes like this; Read more…

I was talking to a client yesterday and a rather unexpected nugget of information surfaced, their Indian office out sources parts of their IT to Australia. We all talk about out sourcing TO India but it seems the tide is turning!

I’ve been doing my bi-annual review of the anti-spam and anti-virus market place and completely missed DSPAM until Mike from Tall Emu (the Online-Armor people) sent me the link. After a couple of hours research and spotting that local firm Sensory Networks (with some funding from Mark and another Mike at TVP) are involved with the technology I think I’ll setup a test bed on one of our domains and take a look.

I remember when Netscape started up in 1994, I’d just moved to the USA to help setup Dr Solomon’s the anti-virus company. I remember Mosaic that preceded it and I now use Firefox and Safari. It seems a shame that after AOL’s attempt to keep it going it’s finally been killed off.

In the endless quest for systems that make life easier I came across Podcast Maker for Apple OSX today. It’s BRILLIANT!, it’s a classic example of a software application that simplifies a ‘manual’ process. Check it out, you’ll be surprised.

Looking for a way of delivering .mp4 video on a web site I went to one of the best resources for Flash video online and discovered that Flash 9 will handle MP4’s. This makes life very easy if you’re looking for a way to Podcast audio and video AND display the original content with web pages.

I met an interesting guy by the name of Lorien Gabel when I was at MessageLabs, he’s just launched a new online venture, Pingg, TechCrunch say it’s “Invitations Done Right”. The invites they send look very smart, which after all is what you want when sending an invite!

I often wonder who makes commercials like these, and their can’t be many people like this capable of producing them!

Having used Basecamp for project managing client projects for a couple of years now I’ve decided to recommend it via their affiliate program;

Use this referral code: 6TJ4P239E or this url to sign-up to Basecamp saves me a few bucks on my account

http://basecamphq.com/?referrer=U6TJ4P239E

Don’t forget to signup for the affiliate program yourself!

Microsoft’s unsolicited offer to buy Yahoo! looks to me like an admission that their (MS) online business is not going to plan. I can’t see Google being threatened by the union of two companies who are failing to make a dent in Googles online search and advertising. Two failing online business strategies don’t make a good one!

Wonderful YouTube video, solar powered walking machine.

When looking around for current methods for 3 column CSS web page layouts I came across this page on a site which has a great collection of valid CSS layouts.

Well, fame at last… -> Bad language warning.