MX Press

MxToolBox launches Zimbra based email continuity solution

2008-04-28T19:56:00Z

Austin, TX – April 30th, 2008 – MxToolBox today announced the immediate availability of a hosted Email Continuity service based on version 5.0 of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS).

The product, called Emergency MailTM Zimbra Edition (EmZ), allows businesses with an on-premise email system to run in parallel with hosted Zimbra servers.   Most popular business email systems including all versions of Microsoft Exchange are supported.

Copies of all email messages are backed up in real time on Zimbra servers hosted in highly redundant MxToolBox data centers. In the event of fire, natural disasters, or server failures, users can continue to communicate with each other and conduct business remotely without disruption simply by accessing their Emergency Mail account.

MxToolBox selected Zimbra, a Yahoo! company, to provide underlying mail server technology because of their best-of-breed anywhere access from virtually any device, and advanced mailbox search capabilities which are critical in a disaster recovery situation.

“We are excited about MxToolBox Emergency Mail Zimbra Edition, it’s an innovative use of Zimbra’s technology and solves a critical business continuity risk facing IT Managers,” said Scott Dietzen, Yahoo! vice president. “MxToolBox customers have access to a best-of-breed email and collaboration solution 24/7.”

The searchable Emergency Mailbox is always available to the end users via the Zimbra AJAX web interface.   Unlike more common replication systems, FlexBox routing technology from MxToolBox scales from businesses from a few users up to thousands, making it one of the first Email Continuity solutions cost effective for small business customers.

The system has already proven itself in real-world situations. John Autry, Manager of Information Systems for the City of Slidell in southern Louisiana notes “numerous times our exchange server has been down and everyone was able to still use their email with the emergency mail.”

MxToolBox founder Eric Rachal describes, “the real power behind our approach is that users can decide themselves when to use their Zimbra Emergency mailbox which means zero switchover time, and zero intervention by IT staff to engage or disengage the system.”    When the customer’s email server comes back up, copies of all messages during the outage are reconciled back with the customer mail server.

Because the system is always available, some IT managers are even using it to lessen the impact of planned downtime. “Major weekend upgrades becomes much less risky when your users never lose access to email,” Rachal notes.

MxToolBox had customers on an earlier version of the service in 2005 who were effected by hurricane Katrina. Some of those customers decided never to plug their mail servers back in, so this version also offers a seamless migration path to a fully managed Zimbra solution via drag and drop web interface.

The service is available immediately from MxToolBox on a monthly subscription basis with pricing starting at $1.99 per user.

MxToolBox Expands Options for IT Resellers

2008-02-05T23:37:00Z

Austin, TX, United States, 02/05/2008 - MxToolBox, Inc.'s announces the launch of ServiceBox™, the first on-demand platform for automating Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery through the IT channel.

	The offering allows IT service firms and VARs to automate the acquisition, provisioning, support and billing of leading software service offerings. ServiceBox™ is the culmination of the firm’s five year track record of automating the delivery of email messaging and security services to small and mid-sized business. The firm currently has distribution relationships with leading vendors in the space. Current partners include Yahoo! (via their acquisition of Zimbra) and Google™ Messaging (via their acquisition of Postini). MxToolBox services thousands of businesses today, with hundreds of channel partners throughout North America. Company representatives describe ServiceBox™ as a powerful tool that integrates the entire on-demand IT service chain into an automated, simplified package. Partners and IT consultants, starting with a single customer order, can use ServiceBox™ to sell, support and bill their customers directly, or allow MxToolBox to handle selected portions. For larger partners, fully integrated support help desk and accounting modules streamline business operations, contract management, technical support and sales pipeline. “When we started selling software service offerings back in 2003, there were no tools to help automate business processes around recurring revenue streams. Everyone was still thinking in terms of SKUs and traditional distribution. Surprisingly, this is still the case five years later,” says Eric Rachal, CEO of MxToolBox. Rachal continues, “The supply chain and distribution channels behind SaaS are rapidly evolving into a complex mess. Vendors and OEMs are struggling to figure it out. Our goal is to make sure the customer never sees that.” MxToolBox is making key elements of the technology available at no charge to qualified information technology service firms through-out North America who place orders through the service. The initial inventory of services available includes Junk Mail filtering, Emergency Mail for business continuity, email monitoring and hosting. The firm expects additional product announcements and partnerships in the near future. About MxToolBox MxToolbox (mxtoolbox.com) is headquartered in Austin, Texas. The company provides on-demand IT Business Management software and innovative on-demand messaging infrastructure and security services to the small and medium-sized business market throughout North America. The company also provides online email diagnostic tools that are used by tens of thousands of email administrators every day.

Messaging Services Firm MxToolBox, Inc Adds Seven Blacklists to Blacklist Lookup Tool

2007-05-21T18:11:00Z

MxToolBox, Inc. announced today that it has added six blacklists, also known as blocklists, RBLs, or DNSBLs, to its popular email blacklist lookup tool. The MxToolBox blacklist lookup tool will now check IP Addresses for listing on the MSRBL-Images, MSRBL-Phishing, MSRBL-Spam, MSRBL-Viruses, MSRBL-Combined and SpamHaus PBL blacklists, in addition to the 130 plus blacklists the tool currently checks.

The company added the lists to the tool to improve the quality of results for users. “We constantly work to make sure we have the most valuable, up-to-date list of Blacklists available to our users,” Founding CEO Eric Rachal said. “If there is a list that might cause deliverability problems for legitimate email users, we want to make sure that it is included it in our tool.”

Blacklists are lists of IP Addresses that have sent spam or have exploitable characteristics. Blacklists are commonly employed by email administrators to block incoming spam. There are dozens of blacklists available for use and each has a unique criteria for including an IP Address. For example, some lists include IP Addresses serving machines that are infected with worms and viruses, and others list IP Addresses within dynamic ranges. While blacklists certainly help fight spam, they can also block legitimate emails from non-spamming IP Addresses, an event referred to as a false positive.

The MxToolBox Blacklist Lookup tool is a free service that allows email administrators and users for non-spamming organizations who are having email deliverability problems to identify any blacklists that list their IP Addresses and see the reasons for the listing. The company also provides free blacklist consultations to companies who are listed or want to proactively avoid being listed. For non-spamming companies with blacklisted IP Addresses that cannot solve the problem, MxToolBox offers unique paid services to permanently eliminate the problem.

Joel Harvey, Director of Marketing explains, “The blacklist tool is not about email blacklists as much as it is about email deliverability. That is what our tool and our services are designed to do—enable and ensure the delivery of legitimate, non-spam email. The first step is to find out that you have a problem, like a blacklisted IP. The next step is to find out why. You may have a virus, you may have some configuration issues, or you may have an IP Address in an un-trusted range. The final step is to take action so that your critical outbound email starts flowing again.”

About MxToolBox, Inc.

MxToolBox.com is a popular website among IT professionals across the globe. The website has free tools that help users uncover, diagnose and fix messaging related problems. The company’s suite of free tools include MX Records Lookup, Server Diagnostics, Blacklist Lookup, SPF Records Lookup, and Free Mail Server Monitoring.

MxToolBox, Inc. offers innovative on-demand messaging infrastructure to the small and medium business market throughout North America. The company provides leading edge “Flip the Switch" messaging services to small and medium sized businesses, including email spam and virus filtering, blacklist protection, hosted email and groupware, email disaster recovery and email archiving.

MxToolBox Offers Free Email Archiving with New Email Hosting Accounts for National Small Business Month

2007-05-04T20:35:00Z

In celebration of National Small Business Month, MxToolBox, Inc. is offering free Email Archiving for new accounts with its FlexBox Business Email Hosting service throughout the month of May. Small Businesses that take advantage of the offer essentially will have free email archiving imbedded with a premium email hosting service for life.

“Small Businesses are becoming increasingly concerned with storing and accessing electronic business communications,” said CEO Eric Rachal. “Recent developments, such as the new Federal eDiscovery Rule and NASD Small Business Continuity Plan Requirements, are driving small business managers to consider the implications of electronic discovery requirements. Preserving the vast amount of business information that is contained within email has also become a major concern” Rachal added, “But, until now, email archiving has been both technologically and cost prohibitive to most small businesses.”

The imbedded email archiving feature within the FlexBox Hosted Email and Groupware package is ideal for small businesses, because it eliminates the need for multiple vendors and platforms, while ensuring that all company emails are preserved and easily retrieved/reproduced for as long as company policy requires. The email archiving feature saves all sent and received emails withint a given account. Even when a user deltes a message from their mailbox, the message remains in the archiving box. All emails and files are indexed for rapid retreival.

The FlexBox Hosted Email and Groupware service is an ultra-secure, ultra-reliable email hosting system designed to give small businesses all of the features that they would get if they had a professionally managed, dedicated email server in-house, without the excessive cost and administrative burden.

“Small Businesses absolutely need the same level of sophistication and functionality from their email systems as large enterprises,” continued Rachal, “It usually just doesn’t make financial sense for them to manage those systems themselves. That’s why we created FlexBox—to give small businesses the security, reliability, flexibility, service and collaborative features that they need, at a price that makes sense.”

FlexBox Hosted Email is based on the Hosted Zimbra mail platform and includes shared synchronized calendars, shared synchronized contacts, shared documents, enterprise grade spam and virus filtering, blacklist protection, one gigabyte of storage per user, and more. The system is designed to work with multiple operating systems, including Windows and Mac, plugs into most desktop mail clients, such as Outlook and Apple Mail, and has an intuitive, powerful AJAX web interface. As an additional bonus, customers can opt to add full synchronization of mobile devices.

When discussing the system’s features, Joel Harvey, MxToolBox’s Director of Marketing chimed in, “These features mean less to small businesses than the results they lead to. At the end of the day, FlexBox lets business managers rest easy. They know that their email is going to work. Messages will be delivered when and where they are supposed to be. Inboxes will not be flooded with spam. Dangerous viruses will be kept off of the network. Blacklists will not be a problem. Additional service needs, such as mobile device synchronization and archiving, can be easily added. Support for PC and Mac users is equally simple. And employees will be happier and far more productive.”

To take advantage of the Email Archiving offer, businesses should contact the company at 866-MxToolBox (866-698-6652) or on the web at www.mxtoolbox.com.

About MxToolBox, Inc.
MxToolBox, Inc. offers innovative on-demand messaging infrastructure to the small and medium business market throughout North America. The company provides leading edge “Flip the Switch” on demand messaging services, including email spam and virus filtering, blacklist protection, email hosting, and email archiving.

eTools Group, Inc. Changes Name to MxToolBox, Inc.

2007-05-02T20:31:00Z

AUSTIN - April 23, 2006 - eTools Group, Inc announced today that it will immediately begin operating under the name MxToolBox, Inc. MxToolBox will continue to serve the small and medium business customers and IT Consultants that currently subscribe to the company's spam and virus filtering and email hosting services.

"We are re-branding because the IT community that uses our tools and services knows us as MxToolBox. We are changing our name to make it easier for people to do business with us and to eliminate any confusion that comes from operating under two names," says CEO Eric Rachal. "For some customers, our name has changed, but our intense customer service ethic and our unwavering commitment to providing value absolutely has not."

Company officials were careful to emphasize that eTools Group, Inc. was not bought by another company and is run by the same people and the same technology that its customers have come to know and rely on. The company will be calling customers and sending letters with invoices to make sure customers understand the change. "The only discernable change that our eTools Group customers will see," said Rachal, " is the logo on their invoices will change from the eTools logo to the MxToolBox logo."

MXToolbox.com is a popular website among IT professionals across the globe. The website has free tools that help users uncover, diagnose and fix messaging related problems. In an era when more and more companies are trying to charge users for access to content and tools, MxToolBox, Inc. is adamant about keeping its free tools separate from its paid services.

The company offers a suite of tools that allow users to test the health of their email systems and to diagnose email related problems. The tools include MX Records Lookup, Server Diagnostics, Blacklist Lookup, SPF Records Lookup, and Free Mail Server Monitoring.

"We believe in providing value to the IT and business communities, whether to a client or someone at-large," says Joel Harvey, Director of Marketing. "The free tools, or MX Widgets, are our way of doing that. Yes, we have paid services that thousands of IT professionals use to solve problems and keep them from reoccurring. Yes, we could charge for our widgets as well. But, in the end that would dilute the value that we provide, which is the last thing we want to do."

eTools Group, Inc Announces Name Change to MxToolBox, Inc.

BLARS Removed From MX Toolbox Blacklist Lookup Tool

2007-01-05T18:34:00Z

MXToolbox.com announced that it has removed the BLARS Blacklist from its Blacklist lookup tool.

[ClickPress, Wed Dec 20 2006] MX Toolbox announced today that it has removed the BLARS Blacklist from its popular Blacklists Lookup tool. The company stated that they removed BLARS as part of on-going quality assurance efforts. The BLARS website has been taken down and there is no available contact information.

According to company representative, the BLARS Blacklist is a notoriously unreliable list for blocking spam, because it practices net blocking, where large ranges of IP addresses are blacklisted. The list’s aggressive net blocking practices have historically led to very high numbers of false positives.

Company representatives stressed that removing BLARS from the blacklist results will not diminish the quality of the lookup tool at all. Instead, it will ensure that the lookup results are as meaningful and accurate as possible, and that users are not inadvertently startled to find their mail server address on a blacklist when there is no reason for concern.

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About MX Toolbox
MX Toolbox offers on-demand messaging infrastructure to the small and medium business market throughout North America. The company provides leading edge “Flip the Switch” on demand services, including email spam and virus filtering, blacklist protection, hosted groupware and email, remote data backup, email encryption, email archiving, IM Filtering, IM Archiving, and Web Content and Virus Filtering.

http://www.clickpress.com/releases/Detailed/23913005cp.shtml

MXWatch Email Performance Index Launched

2006-03-05T18:20:00Z

MXToolbox, Inc., today launches MXWatch, the first-ever email performance index charting the overall health and performance of nearly one thousand email systems worldwide. The index aggregates email performance data across a wide ranging sample of small, medium and large corporations and institutions, graphically comparing the speed at which email servers communicate with one another.

Beginning today, the firm will post its ongoing monitoring results, free of charge, on its website in near real-time at www.mxtoolbox.com/MXWatch.

By making its email monitoring results public via the MXWatch index, MXToolbox hopes to create an online destination for email service and security professionals, as well as reporters, analysts, researchers, and ISPs. MXToolbox founder Eric M. Rachal explains, "Email is critical to business operations, yet when major worm, virus or spam events hit, no one measures the real-time impact. Instead, individual security and IT groups function as isolated islands, with little information on how others are fairing."

The firm is also making its findings available via a free RSS subscription feed providing up-to-date information on major email events as they unfold. "By sharing what we see on a daily basis, we hope to open the communication lines and lesson the business impact of major email threats when they occur. That's good for the community and for our customers," says Rachal.

Here's how it works: MXToolbox continuously monitors the speed at which email servers communicate with each other, measuring the number of seconds it takes to process an SMTP/email transaction. The ability for a system's administrator to compare a specific server's current performance relative to its past performance makes the technology useful in detecting and diagnosing problems. For example, should it suddenly take 8 times longer for an email server to complete a transaction, this could indicate that the server is maxed-out, and unable to tolerate additional load.

In much the same way, users of the MXWatch can identify, at a glance, how email is performing relative to historic trends, thereby putting any issues they may be experiencing into context.

About MXToolbox, Inc.

MXToolbox enables and protects millions of Internet interactions daily, with clients including PBS&J, Amnesty International, TXU and Maytag. Currently, the firm serves as a remotely managed service provider for nearly one thousand customers, representing 500,000 end users.

The firm's mission is to provide small and medium-sized businesses with a diversified suite of corporate messaging services, ranging from spam filtering to email disaster recovery and monitoring. MXToolbox launched its first email security services in 2003.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_pwwi/is_200603/ai_n16086878

eTools Poised to Help Gulf Coast Businesses Rebuild After Rita Via E-mail Disaster Recovery

2005-09-28T18:34:00Z

Austin-Based Company's MXToolBox E-mail Disaster Recovery Enables Hurricane Rita-Impacted Companies to Rebuild Infrastructure and Re-Establish Contact With Customers and Employees

AUSTIN, TX -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 09/23/2005 -- The eTools Group, a leading provider of business e-mail security solutions, announces a special offer for companies impacted by Hurricane Rita. eTools is offering 30 days of free E-mail Disaster Recovery service for businesses in the storm's path. This service provides e-mail continuity, allowing companies to continue operations and maintain critical email communication.

With the storm expected to make landfall along the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana early Saturday, Eric Rachal, founder of the eTools Group, predicts that, "many affected companies' communications infrastructure will be destroyed or heavily compromised. We saw this happen with Hurricane Katrina and want to offer the same assistance we provided then to companies who may now be especially vulnerable to the effects of Rita."

eTools Group offers a simple, powerful solution to keep businesses up and running through such unforeseen emergencies. The company's MXToolBox E-mail Disaster Recovery service allows users to maintain contact with one another and with clients for the duration of any such emergency. To accommodate last minute subscribers, the company has expanded capacity on its MXToolBox systems.

Here's how it works: by enabling "spooling" on its clients' accounts, eTools ensures that it can take over storage of all incoming e-mail in the event of a server crash or power outage. For the duration of such an emergency, users can continue to access their e-mail from any web browser. This allows critical communication among staff and with customers to flow uninterrupted. Once an affected company's server comes back up, eTools automatically delivers all the e-mail that it stored on behalf of its client.

To take advantage of the free MXToolBox E-mail Disaster Recovery service, affected businesses should contact the company at (512) 637-8762. For more information, visit www.mxtoolbox.com.

About eTools Group, Inc and MXToolBox.

The eTools Group (www.mxtoolbox.com) was founded in 1999 to provide innovative business technology services to small and medium sized businesses. Their MXToolBox product offerings allow businesses to monitor, protect and secure email communication networks throughout North America.

http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_printer_friendly?release_id=96111&category=