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In these challenging times, all companies are looking for new places to cut costs and save on cash flow. One of the biggest challenges faced by every business is how to be fiscally responsible while still having the skilled people you need helping you grow your business. E-mail servers are large investments and the cost of keeping one up and running can be a big cash drain. Transitioning to hosted e-mail can be a responsible move for your company.
Everyone is looking at cutting costs right now and one of the ways that those costs can be cut where your company will benefit is through the use of MxToolBox e-mail hosting service. MxToolBox offers the world class Zimbra service that allows you to access your e-mail from any computer or smart phone. Our service will protect you from spam, keep you secure and you won’t have to worry about having your own server.
You can save money and grow during this tough time with a skilled staff at your fingertips. When you use the e-mail service from MxToolBox you not only get the most secure and best e-mail service available, you also get a team of experts who are available 24 hours a day to help with any challenges you encounter. Our technical team is not only the best in the field; they want to talk to you.
In the first in a series, we would like you to get to know our staff better. We know that we hire the best in the business, people who are technically savvy as well as outgoing and customer oriented. We want you to know them too.
Peter LeBlond is the Product Development Engineer for MxToolBox. Peter has a Bachelor of Science degree from Georgia Tech where he focused on Human Computer Interaction with a focus on Networking. Peter has over seven years of experience and he is one of the lucky few of us who uses his degree every day.
Like the rest of our team, Peter, is a key asset to MxToolBox and our customers. We hire people with the best skills so that we can offer the best service to our customers. Peter’s expertise in Human Computer Interaction means that he has the skills to make your experience at MxToolBox as good as it gets. Peter is skilled at making the computer your friend and making your interaction with our software seamless and comfortable.
Peter is a computer specialist at his core, and even when he is home Peter can be found working on his computer and investigating new software development.
Peter loves the ability to use his expertise at MxToolBox, but he also loves to solve problems and interact with customers. That means that when Peter gets a call about a challenge that a customer is having you know it is making his day to address that challenge and solve any difficulties that may have arisen. He truly wants our customers to be happy and when he can solve a problem and make someone’s day…well that’s his calling card.
Update: As of Feb, 5th 2009 the MxToolBox Forums have moved to http://community.mxtoolbox.com/forums
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 When you use email services from MxToolBox, you get the piece of mind of knowing that your email is protected from spam attacks by our team of technology experts. We use the best anti-spam tools available to keep your email and computer safe.
However, sometimes a loophole can be created that lets spam through. These loopholes can be a big problem. Fortunately, MxToolBox can help you remove one of the biggest loopholes: the exploitation of the whitelist.
As many people have experienced, sometimes you will receive email from a spammer who uses a familiar email address to get you to open their message. Spammers know that people are expecting mail from places like Sears and JC Penny and the spammer will use people’s trust to get to them using false addresses. This is called spoofing and can cause you all sorts of headaches.
The spam protection you get with MxToolBox will stop this spam from reaching your computer so that you only get legitimate email from these companies. They have the use of a variety of anti-spam technologies that is able to recognize a message from a legitimate company and one that is from a spam site.
However, one of the loopholes spammers can use is created when a personal whitelist is used by the computer user. Many email programs will allow the user to whitelist an email address or a domain name which allows all the email that has been whitelisted to get straight through to the computer. This can open the door to the Whitelist Exploit.
When an email address or a domain name is whitelisted, which means that ANY message from that email address or that domain name goes to the computer and not through a spam filter safety net. Because of this, spammers will use domain names of popular stores figuring that some of the people will have whitelisted these domains and their spam will get through.
Another popular spamming technique is for the spammer to send an email to a user using their own personal email address. Because a person with the right skills can change their outgoing email address to anything they want, spammers can create a computer program that will send messages to any name imaginable at every email server imaginable and they will be successful every time someone has whitelisted their own email address.
An email program’s spam filter will not catch this because to whitelist something means that it gets a free pass to your computer. The spam filter is not active for a whitelisted address.
So what should you do? The first step to stopping spam as effectively as possible is to call the team of experts at MxToolBox to get information about safely using the whitelist feature. Most people don’t even need to use this feature and will still receive email that is sent from reputable locations. And if you are having difficulty getting email from a certain location the team at MxToolBox is again happy to help solve the problem so that you get the email you need and none of the spam you don’t.
That is one of the main reasons that using email solutions from MxToolBox is so successful for so many people. You can be secure in the knowledge that your email is being handled by people who have the expertise and skill to protect you from spam.
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 The holidays are a tricky time for e-mail security. It’s the time of year when everyone is so busy getting ready for the holidays that little things can get through your security wall much easier. You are busy at work finishing projects and getting ready for the break while ordering gifts from internet sites and getting lots of discount offers and codes for free shipping. Some of your favorite sites are bound to have quite a few offers that you just can’t refuse and so you will click through to see that special offer you have been waiting for. The problem is that while this is the time of year for great holiday specials it is also the time of year when phishing is at its most virulent. People are waiting for packages to ship and watching for their e-mail from UPS, FedEx or the good old Postal Service and that is when phishing is the most dangerous. Phishing is the practice where an entity tries to trick a computer user into sending them usernames, passwords or bank account numbers that it can then be sold to other entities who will use the stolen identity to get credit cards, empty out bank accounts, or other bad things. During the holidays phishing is often done using a false e-mail from an entity pretending to be UPS, FedEx or the US Postal Service. If you respond to these e-mails they ask for certain aspects of your on-line identity which they steal and sell. Everyone knows not to send their information to banks so those phishing expeditions are much less effective with a technically savvy person, but people can still be fooled by a phishing scam that is seen to come from a package delivery company at this time of year. It is the sheer volume of orders that people are making from catalogs and internet sites and each of those orders come with legitimate shipping information and shipping updates. It is easy for a phishing scam to slip by. No one is perfect and that is one of the reasons that MxToolBox offers the highest quality perimeter protection available. MxToolBox will make sure that the phishing never gets to your inbox, which is a huge relief. When you can be certain that the e-mail you receive is legitimate you can rest easy around the holidays. MxToolBox also provides relief for your email system by freeing up bandwidth. When your server has to process all that junk e-mail you lose bandwidth for other functions and it can get bogged down. MxToolBox’s perimeter protection frees your server from even needing to process the junk. Perimeter protection is not offered by all e-mail providers, but it is guaranteed with MxToolBox and our high-quality email service. Your filtered connection through MxToolBox will guarantee that you don’t fall victim to those out there trying to steal pieces of your identity to sell. With MxToolBox you can rest assured through your winter buying sprees that your computer is safe and snug on these winter nights. Photo Credit
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E-mail is easy to lose. While it is not easy to lose the actual e-mail, it is incredibly easy for an important e-mail to get pushed down to the bottom of your inbox or put into a folder and then forgotten. E-mail is one of the most effective organizational tools we have, but this tool can easily create chaos.
This is one of the reasons that the Zimbra Collaboration Suite’s Search Function is so important. The Zimbra Search Function is so efficient that it allows the user complete control over the information.
Zimbra is moving from the less efficient folder organization method that has been cluttering up e-mail systems for years to a more dynamic search function that allows for much more customization. When you open the Zimbra Search Function you are given the opportunity to use a wide range of search tools to efficiently find exactly what you are looking for and you can easily access all of the e-mails that are related to one another with the click of a button.
Zimbra maintains access to the traditional search methods, such as who the e-mail is from, who it is to or who was cc’d, by subject or how it was flagged. So the search capability is still comfortable and familiar to use, but there is so much more.
The Zimbra system uses a well organized search window that allows the user to see all of the search options at once and combine them easily. This added functionality allows the user to search the trash or the junk e-mail folder along with all the traditional folder options. You can even search for keywords inside your attachments, which can be amazingly helpful if you need to find a particular invoice or that much needed document.
Zimbra also allows you to add Zimlets, which are add-ons that are either created by Zimbra to add functionality or are created by third parties that can be downloaded into Zimbra. The Zimlets also allow for “mash-ups” that allow the user to access more than one application in the same window eliminating the need to open more than one application by allowing these applications to be “mashed” together. For instance information from your calendar can be viewed through your e-mail.
With the pre-installed Zimlets you can search for an e-mail using a URL or tracking number, which comes in handy when you are working with a customer who has not received their order or trying to find out when your Amazon order is going to arrive.
There is also the capability to fine tune your search by time since Zimbra has included ‘last hour’ and ‘last 4 hours’ as search options in addition to the traditionally available ability to search by days so that even the busiest person can stay current with their e-mail.
Your searches can even be saved. All of these features can be used together to create the most efficient and useful e-mail search function imaginable. The finesse which Zimbra allows really makes it not only a more elegant solution, but one that is much more practical as well. Searching on Zimbra is like building an elegant structure. You are given all the tools to fine tune your search to get simply the e-mail you were looking for.
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 The people who work at your company are always on the go. Meetings, conferences, site visits all take us away from the office and while laptops are small, they are just too heavy to carry around just so you can have access to e-mail, but e-mail is important and we all need to be connected so we lug our laptops around because as a small or medium sized company it didn’t make sense to spend the money for some of the smart phones that would make our lives easier. Now you can put down that laptop and with the help of MxToolBox and Zimbra you can stay connected to the rest of your company at the touch of a screen through your iPhone. Your iPhone will now synch with your Zimbra applications and “push” technology will make sure that you get an e-mail on your iPhone as soon as it arrives in your in-box. With the Zimbra iPhone solution you will now have access to all of your vital corporate information at all times. Using Zimbra through MxToolBox you can access your e-mail as well as your company’s contacts, meeting requests and calendar events. All of this information is synched with our servers making the iPhone an effective corporate tool. The best thing about the iPhone and Zimbra is that Zimbra is part of a collaboration suite available from MxToolBox that will make your company as efficient as the top guns. One of the key reasons that large companies are able to stay efficient is through their use of collaboration software, a huge suite of services that enable all the sales staff to stay on top of their customers and customer support teams that seem almost psychic since they can access customer information that is shared throughout the company. However, these solutions require expensive software, dedicated servers and full-time IT staff to maintain the system. Now small and medium sized businesses are able to afford the types of solutions that will help their companies work more efficiently. Zimbra through MxToolBox is the answer for small and medium sized businesses who want the benefits of a world class collaboration suite of software. Zimbra allows contacts to be shared by the entire company, which makes closing deals and keeping customers happy that much easier. Calendars are also shared, which means that the entire company knows about important meetings and there is a built in instant messenger. The new iPhone access can now lead to even better company wide collaboration. Another exciting feature of the new iPhone and Zimbra collaboration is the ability for photos for iPhone contacts to be synched with the Zimbra address book, which is a handy tool when you are meeting a client for the first time at a crowded restaurant and you can look up the client’s photo on the company address book. Businesses feed off collaboration. Sales people need to work together to find customers and finish deals, customer service staff need to be certain that customers stay happy and meetings need to be easy to organize. With the access to Zimbra through the iPhone all of this collaboration can now be done at the touch of a screen. Just one more reason to leave the laptop at the office and get an iPhone for the office with Zimbra from MxToolBox. At MxToolBox we thrive on collaboration too. It is one of the reasons that our customer service department is so efficient. We pride ourselves of thinking of our customers first and we want to make certain that you are always happy. The only way for our collaborative system to work is through the use of collaboration software. When we get a customer service request we start a record of this request that can be seen by each of our customer service representatives. Because of our Zimbra collaboration software we are able to work as an efficient team and with the addition of the iPhone compatibility we are now working even better.
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One of the most ironic spam stories we have seen to date was reported yesterday at Wired. For at least six months, botnet infected computers at Pfizer have spewed out a steady stream of Viagra spam. The infection has taken it's toll on Pfizers internet reputation, as researchers are reporting that approximately 138 Pfizer IP Addresses have been blacklisted so far.
Update: As of Feb, 5th 2009 the MxToolBox Forums have moved to http://community.mxtoolbox.com/forums
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A keylogger program on the Carson City, California City Treasurer's laptop recorded city fincial account passwords and allowed hackers to transfer $450,000 in funds to bank accounts in North Carolina and Michigan. City officials quiclkly noticed the missing monies and were able to freeze all by $45,000 of the funds. Update: As of Feb, 5th 2009 the MxToolBox Forums have moved to http://community.mxtoolbox.com/forums
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An email disguised as a message from the IRS is targeting corporate executive's information. The email contains a Rich Text File (RTF) titled complaint.rtf, which, if opened, downloads a trojan to the executive's computer. The trojan steals login passwords and sends them to a remote server.
Update: As of Feb, 5th 2009 the MxToolBox Forums have moved to http://community.mxtoolbox.com/forums
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The Anti-Phising Working Group (APWG) reports that the number Phising URLs detected in April was 55,643, almost double the previous record total.
April also saw a departure from Phishing URLs targeted almost exclusively at stealing login information for Financial Institutions to a more broad focus, including Financial Institutions, Social Netowrking, VOIP, and Email. Update: As of Feb, 5th 2009 the MxToolBox Forums have moved to http://community.mxtoolbox.com/forums
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Robert Alan Soloway was arrested in Seattle on Wednesday. Dubbed "The Spam King" by authorities, Soloway allegedly spammed tens of millions of messages. Most of these contained links to websites where his company, Newport Internet Marketing, sold products and services.
Soloway was once listed in SpamHuas's Top 10 list of spammers and is still in the groups list of 135 internationally known spammers. If convicted, Soloway will face a maximum sentence of 65 years with fines up to $250K.
Upon his arrest, writers at publications across the globe suggested that the level of spam would fall dramatically. However, in reality, Soloway was only responsible for a very small percentage of global spam. His place as an uber-spammer has long been filled by Eastern Europoean spam gangs. In fact, spam levels have not decreased at all in the two days following his arrest.
The most positive effect of his arrest is the message it sends to any spammers or would be spammers operating in the US. Now if we could just get the Russins and Ukranians to follow suit... Update: As of Feb, 5th 2009 the MxToolBox Forums have moved to http://community.mxtoolbox.com/forums
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France has launched a central platform for French internet users to report spam, which will be used to generate a blacklist, notify ISPs and prosecute spammers.
French speaking Internet users can copy and paste a spam message (and presumably the message headers) into a form on the signal spam website, or they can install a plugin that is compatible with most mail clients that will allow them to report a spam message by simply clicking a button icon in their mail client.
It will be interesting to see if a) this catches on, b) has any effect on spam levels in France, and, c) has an effect on spam levels elsewhere. Update: As of Feb, 5th 2009 the MxToolBox Forums have moved to http://community.mxtoolbox.com/forums
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Google reports that an in-depth survey it conducted of 4.5 Million websites shows that 10% of websites are infected with "drive by" malware. The average user's computer is simply not equipped to defend agaist these kind of threats, where simply visiting a compromised website can result in infection. Once infected, a user is vulnerable to data theft, finiancial loss, etc.
The study also showqed that an additional 15% of websites have malware that is capable of compromising a PC, but is less effective at infecting a machine than websites with the more sophisiticated drive by malware.
In the report, titled "The Ghost in the Browser," Google Researcher Niels Provos writes:
"To entice users to install malware, adversaries employ social engineering. The user is presented with links that promise access to ‘interesting' pages with explicit pornographic content, copyrighted software or media. Common examples are sites that display thumbnails to adult videos."
This highlights a very real trend where spammers and hackers (spackers) are complimenting email with the web as a vehicle for payload delivery. Businesses and individuals must reposnd by combining indsutrial strenght email spam and virus filtering with industrial strength web virus filtering. In essence, email security alone is not enough. The paradigm has shifted to total messaging security. Update: As of Feb, 5th 2009 the MxToolBox Forums have moved to http://community.mxtoolbox.com/forums
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We first reported on bots inside Fortune 1000 companies in late March. Since then, the Support Intellegence Project has identified more large corporations with botnet infections. The list has grown to include AIG, AFLAC, Bank of America, Conseco, Thomsen Finacial and 3M. Most of the companies ideitifeid have repordtedly found anf removed the bot infections. They also claim that no data has been compromised. But, how can they be sure?
If a bot can infect and send spam from a network, what is to stop it from logging keystrokes or stealing corporate data?
Update: As of Feb, 5th 2009 the MxToolBox Forums have moved to http://community.mxtoolbox.com/forums
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The House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security approved house bill HR 1525 by voice vote. The bill will now go before Congress for a vote. If voted into law, HR 1525 will make it a crime to install software to alter security settings, damage a computer or commit fraud. Violaters could face fines and/or prisson sentences of two to five years, depending on the offense. Update: As of Feb, 5th 2009 the MxToolBox Forums have moved to http://community.mxtoolbox.com/forums
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On April 26, 2007, Project Honey Pot filed a $1 Billion Dollar Plus lawsuit against spammers in a court in the Eastern District of Virginia. The suit seeks damages on behalf of its members and targets a "large swath" of known spammers and email address harvesters, and is the biggest anti-spam lawsuit ever filed. There is an unspecified number of John Doe defendants represented by more than 2.5 million IP Addresses. You can read a copy of the complaint here. Update: As of Feb, 5th 2009 the MxToolBox Forums have moved to http://community.mxtoolbox.com/forums
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