The best of both wo rlds
As a Microsoft Small Business Specialist,installing and supporting MicrosoftSmall Business Server is a good choicefor your clients with 5 or more users. Itcertainly makes a lot more sense thanhaving all those pesky POP boxes onsome random consumer ISP! However,
what if there were a hosting service product designed from theground up to work in co-operation with Microsoft Exchange,rather than attempting to provide a low-cost and pooralternative to it? Enter MessageFlow from Room101 Ltd.
“ U n ro u teable addre s s” e rrors - how to avoid these
It is best practice in the internet industry for a domain name tobe setup with two MX record servers for relaying email. This isbecause when one is heavily conjested or down, the other willaccept the mail instead. Most clients with a basic SBS setup willsimply have a single MX record pointing directly at their ADSLline, on which Microsoft Exchange is listening to the wholeworld. With Room101’s “MessageFlow” service, email is firstrouted through one of our two Towers, thus providing a muchmore resilient network topology, and also ensuring that evenhours of ADSL downtime will not result in emails to your clientbouncing back to the sender. (In these times of uncertainty,receiving an “Unrouteable address” bounce back for anycompany can cast a shadow over the company’s reputation.Perhaps they went bust?) MessageFlow will store and forwardemails until the ADSL connectivity problem is resolved.
Mail cleaning with Me s s a g e Fl ow
There are many good spam filtering solutions which work onExchange Servers, so why did we build a spam filteringcomponent into MessageFlow which works on hosted servers?Well, now that spam is about 99.9% of all emails, it can severelyreduce ADSL speed if each of these emails has to come intoyour client’s office before being rejected. Having Exchange-based filtering is important, because it can keep a junk folder onyour users’ systems which they can examine. But let’s save thatfor the emails which might be genuine, and let MessageFlowremove the stuff which is OBVIOUSLY spam, such as made upusernames (eg [email protected]) Basically, we cutdown about 85% of spam; the remaining 15% is filtered locally.
Me s s a g e Fl ow spam filte ring te c h n i q u e s
When it comes to spam, MessageFlow uses three methods offiltering. Firstly, our mail servers are linked 24 hours a day tosome of the industry’s leading Realtime Blackhole Lists (RBLs).This type of filtering (by-reputation) is very effective, andcurrently our servers intercept about 3.5 million spams permonth using this method. There is an opt-out which clients canuse temporarily if a key contact of theirs is sending from thenetwork of a currently blacklisted ISP .
Secondly, we run the incoming emails against an up-to-date listof valid users. This beats all those “guessed email address”spammers (and there are a lot of them!)
Finally, we have a proprietory content filtering system whichupdates every minute with news about the content of currentspamming campaigns. A typical spam mailshot these days is abillion or more recipients - unless your client is in the first 1000
or so emails spammed to, MessageFlowwill recognise the content of a spamwhich may have made it past the otherchecks. It can then either wipe it, tag it ordump it in a special SpamBox webmailsystem for the client’s perusal, should theywonder if a genuine email has beenwrongly intercepted. (Tagging is great fortesting purposes, or whilst the client is
getting used to the system).
Wh at are the limitations of Me s s a g e Fl ow ?
We recognise that clients and resellers hate “per user” charges,therefore, we charge instead per block of 5 domain names.Additional blocks of 5 domain names can be added to the basicservice for £50 +VAT.
The Me s s a g e Fl ow pricing options
The recommended resale price of MessageFlow is £250 + VATper annum. There is no setup fee. However, we’ve found thusfarthat most of the signups have been through IT SupportCompanies, who are reselling the product to their own clients.For these, we’ve introduced a generous reseller discount of 30%,making your price £175 + VAT per annum.
Room 101, Erico House, 93-99 Upper Richmond Road,Putney, London SW15 2TG
Tel: 0845 0036 101 Fax: 0845 0037 101email: [email protected] www.room101.co.uk
Information sheet:
Using the Room101“MessageFlow” serviceto clean up your email
Call Richard Fincher now 0845 0036 101Room101internet services
08
Room 101, Erico House, 93-99 Upper Richmond Road,Putney, London SW15 2TG
Tel: 0845 0036 101 Fax: 0845 0037 101email: [email protected] www.room101.co.uk
Information sheet:
Using the Room101“MessageFlow” serviceto clean up your email
Call Richard Fincher now 0845 0036 101Room101internet services
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