Monthly Archives: September 2008

Zimbra Comes to the iPhone

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Zimbra and the iPhoneThe 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.

NDRs (Non-Delivery Reports)

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NDR spam: Why am I receiving an NDR for a message I didn?t send?


NDRs are a normal part of email exchanges, but spammers’ activities can cause spikes in NDR activity. Spammers send junk messages to thousands of email addresses, some of which exist and some of which do not. To give the appearance that their messages are legitimate, spammers use a practice called “spoofing,” whereby they manipulate the “From” address to use a real domain or sender.


When a spammer sends email to an invalid address, the receiving mail server sends an NDR message to the “From” address, rather than to the actual sending server. Because spammers spoof common addresses, such as sales or info of well-known companies, these NDRs may be destined for your mail server.



Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender


Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.


Subject: Report update


The following recipient(s) could not be reached:


webmmaster@jumboinc.com on 03/15/2008 11:09 PM


The e-mail account does not exist at the organization this message was sent to. Check the e-mail address, or contact the recipient directly to find out the correct address.


Another challenge is that the growth in NDRs is driven by the overall growth in spam activity. The more messages spammers send, the greater the number of spam messages sent to invalid addresses, resulting in more NDRs.


We highly recommend that anyone running a corporate email server invest in top-of-the-line Anti-spam technology.  It will pay off a thousand fold in the long run.  Most good anti-spam solutions do a reasonable job of limiting the impacts of NDR spam attcks.  But almost all still will allow a sender to try quite a few bad recipients before shutting them down. 

Threat Advisory: CNN and MSNBC Spam

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Over the past two weeks, we’ve seen waves of high-volume attacks (over 15% of all spam messages) using false CNN and MSNBC content. Our botnet protection has blocked the vast majority — over 99% — of these attacks and mutations, and we continue to release filter updates that automatically delete some variants.


We’d like to provide you with an update on recent spam attacks.


Our message security vendor has advised us on high volumes of bogus CNN and MSNBC messages that contain links to download malware. Spammers have copied the contents of CNN and MSNBC alerts and substituted a link that prompts users to upgrade to a new version of a fake Adobe Flash player.


The security service has detected and blocked the vast majority of these attacks, and continues to release protections to stop the new mutations. Their capture rate is over 99%; however, the attack volumes are so large (in the hundreds of millions of messages) that a 1% passthrough rate means that a few messages may end up in your inbox.


For best security practices, if you see any CNN, MSNBC, or suspicious news alert messages:




  • Do not deliver these messages from your Message Center or Quarantine Summary.
  • Delete these messages from your inbox.
  • Do not click on any links in the messages.

If you need to access CNN or MSNBC content, visit the website directly.


Please be assured that our security service considers virus and spam protection as their highest priority, and continues to be on the cutting edge against new spam attacks and tactics.


Virus and Spam Trends


Following is the summary of email threats and trends we track for our user base of over 40,000 organizations.


Viruses Increase: In July, our systems recorded the largest volume of email virus attacks of the year. On July 20, our zero-hour virus protection technology detected and caught emails that contained a spoofed UPS package-tracking link intended to lure recipients into clicking it and downloading malware. This virus wave peaked at nearly 10 million messages on July 24.



On August 5, we experienced a large inflow of messages with an encrypted .RAR attachment. While the use of attachments as a virus delivery mechanism generally decreased in 2008, this new virus showed that tactics continue to vary.


Spam Levels Remain High: April showed peak spam volumes for 2008, but the overall level of spam remains high this summer. The average user has received 133 spam messages per day this year. Our statistics show that the average unprotected user would have received 36,000 spam messages in 2006 and 36,000 in 2007. This year’s July total shows a 68% growth rate over the same time in 2007. In short, spam attacks in 2008 have not let up from previous years.