Category Archives: Newsletter

August 2010 – Sailing the Email Marketing Seas

Sailing the Email Marketing Seas

We talk to a lot of people who have ended up on Email Blacklists and who are looking for help getting off of them. The two most common ways to get yourself blacklisted is to either get a workstation infected with malware or to try to do Email Marketing yourself.

For the purpose of this article, email marketing is any email that you are trying to send out to a large number of recipients for whatever reason. Newsletters, Mass Mail / Bulk Mail, automatic reminder notifications, they are all basically the same to a recipient mail server, and we get asked by many people running their own mail servers what they can do to avoid getting blacklisted.

This newsletter is broken down into three sections of information.

Taking a Cruise – Covers the advantages of using a third party source for your email marketing.
Row, Row, Row Your Boat – Tips and tricks to maximize your results when sending out bulk mail yourself from your own email server.
The Bermuda Triangle – Highlights all of the horrible things that can happen if you choose to email from your server.

Email Marketing is Not Bad
Before we detail the problems you might run into, we want to state for the record that we are not against email marketing or harbor any opinion against organizations which make use of it as a tool to grow their business, communicate with their customers, or promote their products online. However after we discuss the pitfalls ahead, you might think again about hitting send on an email campaign from your server.

Taking a Cruise

When asked for quick advice from administrators on how they can safely send bulk mail, our short answer is almost always, “don’t try to send bulk mail yourself.” Because email is so important for day to day business communication, we strongly recommend using a specialized service designed for email marketing so that your business mail systems are not compromised.

Take the complications which usually arise when you try to do this yourself and combine them with the value added features that specialized services offer and it’s almost always cheaper in the end to have somebody else do the heavy lifting. Here are some examples of why this usually ends up being true.

Maintenance
Using a 3rd party mailing service can help streamline many of the processes that you would have had to do manually with your own mailing list. Typically these services will offer specialized tools for managing user lists and help by automatically unsubscribing users whose addresses bounce multiple pieces of mail.

Zero to Hero
Sudden surges in email flow raise lots of red flags to Email Service Providers (ESPs). If your server usually sends 100 emails per day but sends 10,000 in one hour, then all sorts of different countermeasures can be deployed to ward off spam. Dedicated mass email companies can deliver high volumes of email without triggering red flags because they always deliver high volumes of email.

Copy Cat
ESPs are no dummies. When they see identical messages they know they are bulk mail. When you send an identical message to more than one person in a short period of time, it can very likely be treated as junk. Dedicated services get around this is by having a strong reputation. ESPs learn to recognize professional bulk mailers and give them some leeway. They also usually space out deliveries over time as a courtesy.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
Sending an email to a closed account or with a typo in it can be frustrating when you send one, but it is a sure sign of bulk mail when you send 10 close together. Email marketing services and software pay close attention to bounce back messages which signify closed accounts because ignoring these can have devastating effects at who will accept emails from you.

CAN-SPAM
Not only are you being a nuisance if you send mail that people don’t want, but you might be breakingthe law. Professional email marketers are usually very cautious to stay within regulations. Doing so is prudent not only for getting caught, but for getting your email accepted. Building CAN-SPAM compliance yourself takes time and energy.

If a tree falls in the woods…
What’s the point of sending out a bazillion messages if nobody gets them, or if they go to Junk, or if they never get opened? Which messages get good responses, which did not? When is the best time to send your mail? Did the version with the new images do better or worse than the one with the old ones? Get more out of your efforts by tracking where your messages are going and who is reading and who is clicking. Third parties compete with features like these and have dedicated teams working on getting the most out of each message for you. Take advantage of them.

Recommendations
There are many Email Marketing companies out there to choose from. We at MxToolBox have had experience working with and can recommend StreamSend, have worked with clients using Constant Contact, and we like MailChimp because it has a funny name. Additionally MxToolbox has recently partnered with Aweber and those folks over there will take good care of you.

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

If a 3rd party mailing service is not the right fit for your company, you can do it alone, but there are many things you’ll want to consider. While your mail server seems capable of sending lots of email, many people find out too late that lots of problems can arise when they try it.

Nobody likes Drinking from a Fire Hose
Don’t all of a sudden deliver thousands of identical messages to a server all at once. If you can trickle your messages out they will be much more warmly received.

Does Everyone want your Mailings?
This one may seem simple enough, but often times users sign up for Newsletter or Bulk Mailing without realizing it. To increase the inbox delivery rate of your messages, make sure that all recipients on your distribution lists actually want to receive the mail by providing good content that isn’t salesly or pushy and is intriguing to your audience. To help further confirm that individuals do want your mailings, we recommend using double Opt in. Obtaining permission to send your email is critical.

You Don’t Want ’em Slamming the Spam Button
When you send mass emails to people who never asked for them, they’re going to hit the spam button and this seriously adversely affects delivery. This action from the recipient will definitely get you in trouble with Email Service Providers, and could get your email and IP address blacklisted.

Don’t Hide the Unsubscribe Button
While using Opt in to confirm your recipients is highly recommended, you will also want to make sure it is easy for your users to Unsubscribe if they desire. If users can’t unsubscribe easily, they may just mark your message as spam and that hurts your reputation. We recommend making sure the Unsubscribe button is easy to spot and the process to unsubscribe is a painless as possible.

Complicated Technical Tomfoolery
There are many different means and systems out there that have been created to try to help senders verify themselves so they can be trusted by recipients. They can be very complicated and spell disaster if configured incorrectly. They each have different pros and cons and are each implemented using different techniques. Some of these tools are:

Reverse DNS – A DNS record for the IP address that you send mail from points to your domain. You can read more about rDNS in our forums.
SPF Record – We only recommend configuring this if you are extremely comfortable with your network. If this is not configured correctly it can negatively impact mail flow or cause bounced messages. We would recommend using the Open SPF Wizard to configure your SPF record.
Domain Keys – “DomainKeys” creates a domain-level authentication framework for email by using public key technology and the DNS to prove the provenance and contents of an email.
DKIM – DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) lets an organization take responsibility for a message while it is in transit.

The Bermuda Triangle

Measures Taken Against Bulk Mailers
Administrators of email servers are free to take any actions that they choose best when trying to detect and defend against malicious attacks, spam, viruses, and bulk mail. They draw the lines of what they consider a threat and they dictate the penalties for crossing their lines with the sender having little to no recourse that they can take. Here are some of the things you can experience if you aren’t careful.

Being Blacklisted – It feels about as bad as it sounds. Your IP or domain name gets put on a list. These lists are independently operated and specialize in different fields such as Spam, Viruses, ect. Administrators can subscribe to these lists, usually for free, and then take whatever action they like. The modus operandi is to reject connections from IP addresses on a blacklist resulting in a major delivery issues for all of your mail.

Getting Graylisted – The receiving server lets you go through the trouble of transmitting your email just to return a 400 response, which means try again later, on purpose. This results in the email being delayed since your server will wait before it retries. It also means that you have to burn twice as much bandwidth and CPU to get it delivered and that’s if they only make you try 2 times.

Throttling – Usually traffic over the Internet goes as fast as the pipes being used will allow. There are complicated means of accomplishing this that go on in the background. However one side of the connection can easily set the speed limit to slow things down if they like. This can be done for resource conservation for a receiving server but could also be employed to force a sender to use up more of a precious resource – time.

Tarpitting – Basically this just means that as your server is talking to their server, they just take a short little break between each communication. The result is that it slows down the rate of transmission. If your server is configured to only have a set number of connections open at once, it can also cause your queues to back up.

Blackhole – Hey nice email. Let me put that someplace nice…right over here in the bit bucket. Gone forever. No bounce, no nothing. Not very fun.

One Man’s Garbage – Is nobody’s treasure. Off your messages go to the junk folder to hang out with some of the worst messages ever dreamed up. Sometimes even messages that aren’t part of the campaign get junked because they come from a source of bulk mail.

Additional Resources
Moms Email Marketing Tips
Bulk Email Help

July Newsletter
A Castle in the Clouds – Google Apps

From all of us at MxToolBox, thank you for your business and your time.

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July Newsletter: A Castle in the Clouds – Google Apps

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A Castle in the Clouds – Google Apps

Of all the technologies that you use to run your business, chances are good that none have a greater impact than the office productivity suite including email, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Many small companies are daunted by the task of finding a solution at the right price, with sufficient security, and with productivity features that their users can actually use without needing a lot of additional training. Google has put together some impressive web based software and services which can be an attractive solution for many small companies with limited IT resources.

Table of Contents

Google Apps – What and Why
Advantages of Living in the Clouds
Is Google Apps Right for your Company?
Protecting your Precious Data
Why a Reseller
Helpful Links

Google Apps – What and Why

Google Apps grew out of Gmail, a free online email offering released April 1st, 2004 that offered many fantastic features, most notably the ability to search your email using the Google “special magic” algorithms and very large mail box storage sizes. They have continued to pour on features and gigabytes at an aggressive pace ever since.

Many people fell in love with this new product and demanded that Google offer a branded version to businesses which they did, calling it “Gmail for your Domain” now known as the Google Apps Suite. What started with Gmail branched out into Calendars, Documents, Chat, and Sites. They continually update the applications adding features and making things easier to understand and use which automatically appear without any effort from administrators or users.

Advantages of Living in the Clouds

There are so many components and nifty features which are part of Google Apps that it would take a book to talk about all the stuff you can do with them. We would like to highlight some of the parts of Google Apps that are only made possible because of the platform that powers them, cloud computing. Here are some things that no desktop software can reproduce because Google Apps is hosted in Google’s massive secure datacenters and maintained by Google Engineers.

Security – Google can provide excellent security for their services because they have so much experience doing so. The back end systems that power your Google Apps accounts are the same that they built to operate its own business services, including its core services like Google Search. The security controls that isolate data during processing in the cloud were developed alongside the core technology from the beginning. Security is thus a key component of each of the Google Apps elements, such as compartmentalization, server assignment, data storage, and processing.

Scalability – The engineers at Google have learned how to do some tasks very very well. Many would argue that in these core competencies that they are the best in the world. One of those things is ability to index, store, and search huge amounts of information. They have also mastered creating web applications that can scale up to serve enormous numbers of people very quickly. You never have to worry about buying more hardware or upgrading software because the guys at Google have it taken care of for you.

Availability – Large corporate data centers must invest in redundant systems, software built to run in clusters for fail over operation, multiple backups of data including off site backups, and other such expensive technology because their data and their operations are at such a large scale that they cannot afford to be offline or lose data. While some of that technology has trickled down to be within the reach of small businesses using local hardware and software solutions, unfortunately it is still expensive and can be very complicated. Cloud computing puts the high-availability technology at your fingertips. Premier accounts have a 99.9% uptime SLA for Gmail and the status of all services can be viewed at a glance.

Sharing – Work together without the hassles of attachments. Coworkers can share the same online copy of each doc, spreadsheet or presentation and work on it together in real time. All revisions are saved and recoverable so there is only ever one file and you never have to worry about having an old copy. You can present and publish through the web from that same copy. Presentations can be delivered to remote audiences, and documents and spreadsheets can be published internally for employees to view. Google Docs inter-operate with traditional file formats so you aren’t leaving civilization behind to work on an island of new file types. You can import and collaboratively edit or publish from .doc, .docx, .xls, .csv, .ppt, .txt, .html, .pdf and other formats. You can export to these files as well if you need to deliver your documents to somebody in a specific format.

Redundancy – For Google Apps customers, the RPO design target is zero, and the RTO design target is instant fail over. This is done through live or synchronous replication: every action a customer takes in Gmail is simultaneously replicated in two data centers at once, so that if one data center fails, Google nearly instantly transfers that data over to the other one that’s also been reflecting the actions. The goal is not to lose any data when it’s transferred from one data center to another, and to transfer your data so quickly that you don’t even know a data center experiences an interruption. Of course, no backup solution from us or anyone else is absolutely perfect, but Google has invested a lot of effort to help make it second to none.

Is Google Apps Right for your Company?

We love Google Apps in our office but there are certainly cases where it might not be the best product for specific organizations due to their needs or work flows that they have established.

Here are some of the issues that have come up when talking with some of our clients about a possible migration to Google Apps. We were able to work with a great deal of clients together to overcome or find suitable work arounds and resulted in an eventual migration to Google Apps. However some clients found solutions with other vendors that were more compatible with their needs. Having a conversation with a Google Apps Reseller is highly recommended to see how your needs match up with Google Apps.

The Engineers at Google have approached each of the Google Apps products without the prejudice of keeping traditional methods and features. They try to evaluate the actual requirements for each component and strive to find the best solution without being scared of breaking new ground. This approach has resulted in some aspects of Google Apps being very different from other platforms. Most of the complaints and negative feedback we hear from people contemplating Google Apps is that things are not done the traditional way. If you have a client that will put up a great deal of resistance to changing procedures or an organization full of users that fear change, then those users may require additional training to become comfortable.

No Folders – One clear example of this type of being “different” is the lack of folders for organizing mail. Many users have extremely complex folder hierarchies that they have built over their years of using email and have invested hundreds of hours creating and maintaining. Gmail uses labels to organize messages. The benefit in doing so is that a message can have multiple labels where the folder structure forced users to either nest folders or to make decisions on which folder it was going into.

Gmail is not Exchange – Google has put a lot of effort into creating their Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook tool to allow you to continue to use the mail client that you are used to using with Google Apps. They continue to update it and in general it works great, but some things are a bit different, especially the “high level” non-core proprietary functions that have been created by Microsoft.

Beta Releases – Google isn’t perfect and they are still working on getting some of the things that others have mastered correct. For that reason they often release things in Beta form and they can be turned on/off and enabled with Google Labs for your users. However as the title says, these are in Beta form and may have some bugs until they are fully released. Anything that is questionable or is having problems is able to disabled if you find that it does not work for you.

Contacts – Google Apps released their Contact software a few months ago and users were excited to hear of its release, but you still cannot share contacts, which is a highly sought after feature. There is no way to edit your Global Address List (GAL) from the administrative console. A GAL is dynamically generated from your user list but it doesn’t include groups.

Downtime Helplessness – Google doesn’t go down often (99.9% uptime SLA) but when it does, everything you do and own is now offline. You are stuck having to wait for Google to fix the problem. Some of the most scrupulous people would much rather have direct access and ultimate responsiblity for their own problems.

Protecting your Precious Data

One of the most often asked about topics and one that often is the most critical in making the decision to contemplate utilizing a hosted or cloud based solution is data privacy and to a lesser extent, data ownership. The idea that a hacker could access your companies’ data or that Google might be looking at or allowing other companies to see your data is very troubling to many executives and decision makers.

Google is well aware that this is the most critical aspect for so many people and is doing everything it can to try to put in place safeguards in order to build a level of trust with its clients and prospective clients. At the end of the day Google is asking you to put your data will be in the hands of a third party, and they are aware of this. They also know that they cannot drop the ball here or all of the great technology and features will be for naught. The biggest commodity they have is the trust of their clients to protect their data.

The Data Liberation Front says on their home page, “Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.” Google makes great efforts to make sure that there are methods to both migrate your data into services they provide, but also ways to extract your data, which is yours, back out in a portable format to do with as you please. The Data Liberation Front is an internal group at Google whose job it is to make sure that the door out is never locked. This should give you great peace of mind that if you do ever want to leave, you can take your ball and go home.

Why a Reseller

The primary means of offering assistance for Google Apps is with their online Help Articles and their Help Forums. While these are generally excellent as far as self-help solutions go, few people would want something as integral to their business to be without a live human support resource to answer questions and fix problems. Google does offer phone support but only to report service unusable issues. They have email support but often the response times are notoriously long.

Google’s vision was to fill this void by creating a market for resellers to provide services and support to customers who want more hands on support. Here at MxToolBox we have sales and support techs available via phone or email to answer questions and offer suggestions on how to best to leverage Google Apps to achieve your goals. We have a ton of experience with deploying Apps in many different environments so we can guide your migration to be smooth and customize it to tailor fit your organization. If we do run into a technical snag, we can contact Google on your behalf as a reseller and work with their techs and your technical contact to find a quick resolution.

MxToolBox is proud to be a certified Google Apps Reseller. We would be happy to talk with you to determine if Google Apps would be appropriate for your business. Please contact us for more information, you can call 866-MXTOOLBOX or click here to fill out a contact form.

Helpful Links

Migration Information – The migration tools below are offered directly from Google but we would highly recommend enlisting a reseller to answer questions as to which might be best for your organization.

Updates – Google has several blogs that highlight all of the great features, but one of our favorites is the Google Apps Update blog. It provides updates of Beta and Lab features and features that haven’t been released yet. Make sure to add this to your RSS feed:

Top Ten Advantages of Google’s Cloud – A quick Top Ten of the best features of Google according to Google.

Advantages of using Google Apps – Info Crystals put together a good concise list of the advantages of using Google Apps for your Business.

June Newsletter
Malware, and Spam, and Viruses! Oh, my!

From all of us at MxToolBox, thank you for your business and your time.

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Malware, and Spam, and Viruses! Oh, my!

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Malware, and Spam, and Viruses! Oh, my!

We have started to see a wave of spam emails containing links to sites hosting malware which are getting past the filters of even the best anti-spam services. Some of these emails have a customized subject with a claim that you need to reset your password. Here are some recent examples:

Subject: Reset your ‘domain.com’ password
Subject: Your ‘domain.com’ account information has changed
Subject: UPS INVOICE NR1234XXX

The link appears to be to your own domain, but in fact it goes to a site that attempts to install malware on your computer. We have developed a content filter for this type of spam and we have applied it to our customers already.

It is important to have multiple levels of defenses in place because no one technology can ensure 100% protection. Defending against spam, malware and viruses is a reactive process which means that any new threat will pass through for at least a few users before the identification engine learns to block it. For email and web traffic anything that passes through before these patches have been released, the damage has been done.

We are seeing more and more spam tactics like this that include links to malware or other harmful scripts designed to infiltrate your network which are not actually attached to an email message or file. In addition to being vulnerable to these types of attacks due to definitions that have not been updated, almost every spam filtering service allows you to define whitelists which are not scanned for content, however they still enforce virus scanning for attachments. These attacks are propagated in the content so your whitelist is effectively removing your protection from these types of attacks.

What you really need to do is approach the actual source of the problem which is your web browser, when instructed, it follows the harmful links and brings back any threats included on the web page. Only scanning your email for attachments is like locking the doors and then leaving the windows open.

MxToolbox has partnered with WebRoot (June Newsletter) to offer Web Filtering to protect your network from attacks through the web browser. Webroot eliminates spyware and viruses with best-of-breed scanning engines and offers a 100% guarantee. In addition to protecting against malware you have the ability to enforce web access policies and it generates detailed reports. For additional details on the protection that this program can offer, go here.

May Newsletter
Web Security with Webroot

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May 2010 Newsletter – Web Security with Webroot

April 2010 Newsletter – Ping Tool

March 2010 – MxToolBox Supertool (DNS tool)

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MxToolBox has provided many free tools over the years and we are pleased to announce our newest tool, the SuperTool! This tool gives users the ability to do different types of lookups from one common location. To use the new tool, simply go to MxToolBox.com and input a domain name, IP Address or Host Name. To give you an example, I looked up the MX records for crawfordbowling.com:

Included in the results box are links to related tests you might want to run based on the lookup you just performed. Or if you want to go in a different direction you can run any other lookups by typing the command in the box like blacklist:208.65.144.12 , a:google.com, or smtp:208.65.144.12 .

Next, I ran an email diagnostic on the server by clicking on SMTP Test:

Then the last test I did was a reverse lookup:

A really cool feature that you may not have noticed is that the page adds the results from your latest test on top of your previous tests. This helps keep track of all the tests you have run.

Recently we added even more DNS lookups to the SuperTool and we are adding new tools as fast as we can to make sure we stay on top. If you have any tool additions that you would like to see, please let us know. We are also very interested in how these tools are being used out in the wild so we can better tailor them to your needs.

command	explanation
blacklist:	Check IP or host for reputation
smtp:	Test mail server SMTP (port 25)
mx:	DNS MX records for domain
a:	DNS A record IP address for host name
spf:	Check SPF records on a domain
txt:	Check TXT records on a domain
ptr:	DNS PTR record for host name
cname:	DNS canonical host name to IP address
scan:	Perform a port scan on the host New!
whois:	Get domain registration information New!
arin:	Get IP address block information New!
soa:	Get Start of Authority record for a domain New!

	Other tools coming soon
http:	Get web page at URL
https:	Get web page at URL using SSL encryption
ping:	Perform a standard ICMP ping
trace:	Perform a standard ICMP trace route

The SuperTool is the culmination of our firm’s six year track record of providing Free tools for system administrators to assist in Network troubleshooting. This one-of-a-kind tool gives users the ability to do different types of lookups from one common location. Since many DNS tool providers have chosen to provide paid only services, we are proud to continue hosting these free tools on our site.

You might be thinking, what’s the big deal about this new tool? Great question. Let me begin by saying that we’re just as skeptical as you are when people throw around words like one-of-a-kind, revolutionary, groundbreaking, etc. When we say that the SuperTool is one-of-a-kind, we can prove it. Try it out for yourself and you will see that you can look up all of your MX records, DNS, Blacklist and SMTP diagnostics in one integrated tool. It is amazing.

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