I tend to keep my company to a really high standard because not only is it my business, but my business rides on top of that infrastructure. So when someone has a problem, its my problem too. I tend to say we suck (though over 2007 we have fixed approximately 80% of the outstanding issues) but things happen to get much worse out there. Take a look at this story.

One of the ISPs in UK, 123-Reg, apparently (just guessing but their comments and commenters) had a DDoS take its name servers out of commission on Friday and they apparently had the weekend off and didn’t get around to recovering the service till last night.

But note the comments.. people are pissed not because the stuff crashed, not because the money they lost, not because of incompetence - they are pissed because there was no notice, no communication, no way to reach anyone.

This is a big problem, one that is very complex to fix. If you think it’s simple, you can probably count the number of customers on one hand. Establishing the communications channel is simple - you throw up a blog, podcast, video blog, newsletter, direct mail, print it on the back of the business card, scotch tape it to the bathroom door. The complex part is getting your customer base to adapt to the single, official communications process. Your customers have to adopt your preferred way of communication to theirs. It can be tough to do, but it has to be firm and it has to be consistent.

After all, you can’t order a Pizza at a McDonalds.. And you can’t request support through email. (I’ve said this dozens of times and never had my ass kicked, your mileage may vary)

Over the past few days the Internet has been full of the conflict of interest coverage, be it from jaded lovers or angry blog authors who thought they mattered.. and I suppose it’s a sad realization when you realize you don’t.

First up, Scoble seems to be surprised that his friends will not go on camera bashing Apple for their crappy products. It’s got nothing to do with Apple, it all has to do with self-interest: CEO’s of Web 2.0 vaporware have to be nice to everyone on the record because they want to do business or be acquired by those companies. Scoble, who gets a lot of press attention, is a blogger - not press, so he didn’t get the iPhone up front or a free PowerMac or whatever he wanted so he is calling Apple for what everyone already knows. Second, a whole slew of people seem pissed at Steven Levy, who gave a glowing review of what is one fugly, closed, DRM-ridden piece of trash product from Amazon that costs more than the competition. Who is complaining? Thats right, the guys that didn’t get a free one.

To put it in perspective, this is like me calling out Microsoft for Zune 2 sucking because I didn’t get one. And that Lamborgini Murcielago, what a joke!

So here is a lesson for the aspiring bloggers: You either have to be an undying, unquestionable fanboy, or you better hide from any camera / voice recorder / cell phone lest you be caught saying the wrong thing to the wrong people..

How do these folks sleep at night with all that ego and fear on their minds?

Mark says: “ODG, was Vlad actually right?”

Now Mark is a pretty smart guy but I get the “I hate it when you’re right” speach every other day from people that deal with me (as opposed to “OMG, you’re not a total ass I imagined!” that I get every day). It really pains me when you look at some of my posts and make it out like I was the first one to call the date of Christ’s return.

This stuff was apparent and obvious to everyone in this sector a long time ago. Yet, when I wrote that post I got slammed as I usually do. So let’s rewind:

Google emerges among Microsoft’s inability to dominate the Internet through its closed software and closed standards. Majority adopts open source and open standards, Google gives everything away for free and just drops a few ads on the side that nobody seems to mind. Google becomes a dominant force in the fight for Internet eyeballs, starts moving the software it beta tests on the consumers into universities and into companies. It starts building its suite off easy to use products while Microsoft suffers embarrasing product releases, support, pricing schemes and PR problems. Everyone except the privacy advocates love Google, hating Microsoft turns into a dominant smartphone, major switch PR campaign and disenfranchised partner ecosystem that sees a sunset to its business process as everyone enters the fight for the SMB customer.

And then that sound of inevidability, that nobody likes to believe is very loud for everyone to hear: Big companies like working with big companies.

You see companies hedging their bets and teaming up with one another for the be all end all goal of owning the largest piece of the audience – with it, their entertainment dollars, business dollars, service dollars, ecommerce dollars and so on. The race is on, current business models are changing at the top and that is something to pay attention to.

Yet, my dear peers beat me up when I said everyone needs to go to attend WWPC if they want to be at the front of the pack. Everyone discounts the posts about Google when the conversation about SMB is taking place. Everyone laughs when I talk about Microsoft..

Yet, Karl and I sat there at WWPC during Steve Ballmers keynote and watched him outline a 3 year plan to replace the only advantage IT solution providers in SMB sector currently have: direct access to the customer.

What’s your move? More importantly, who is yo daddy?

Update: I feel compelled to admit that I left one thing out:

This move does not make Microsoft the devil, they happen to be the victim in the current arrangement. Yes, even with 30 billion a quarter, their future looks grim. Their online services division loses a billion a year and they have made far too many enemies in every segment and every industry and each day makes them look worse while Google and Apple can seem to do no wrong. Microsoft is given 0 benefit of the doubt, while Leopard has worse troubles than Vista ever had, iPhone is more closed than anything Microsoft ever put together and guess who is the saint and who is the devil in that equation.

People are speculating that Microsoft needs to buy Yahoo to stay relevant in the Web 2.0 race. They are investing in Facebook. They are trying to do everything they can to remain on top and keep their investors sitting on their hands. If you invested in Google a year ago, your money would have doubled. If you did the same for Apple, your money would have tripled. Microsoft, you’d be lucky to cover the trade comission.

Microsoft has no friends. It has no loyal friends either - Dell is selling Linux and Solaris, Intel is powering their main competitors…. and in turn, as an organization it must do what it has to in order to grow, prosper and keep people from pulling their money out of Nasdaq: MSFT.

In the grand scheme of things, Microsoft just got a huge friend in Comcast and hedged its bets against its competitors in Google.

It’s a great day for Microsoft.

Sucks if you’re their partner that just saw the Software+Services replace your competitive advantage.

-Vlad

I must admit that I am more of a fan of conversations that happen out there than I am of the “original” posts, so for a few people I subscribe to the blog comment feeds in addition to the article lists. Helps me see what others think in response. This comment in particular really made me think of Office Space, it’s of an IT consultant looking for Microsoft to paint a better “value proposition” picture for his clients:

“I guess the thing I struggle with is knowing *how* to engage with MS when MS are just one of my product stack. I reckon that when we put a proposal together we get stuff from about 8-10 different sources, one of them being Microsoft. Microsoft are basically box-shifters, they want volume and I can’t (and probably never will) give them great volumes. All their campaigns, go-to-markets etc all seem to be about shifting product whereas what we need is something that helps with blending all those disparate strands together to make a compelling message for our clients.”

In USA, Microsoft has gotten a lot better in helping smallbiz IT consultants paint a compelling picture of integrated services, software and benefits. They will help you market, deliver, support and even finance the solution.

That bold faced part in the quote above really made me think of Office Space where the two consultants look at the employee, puzzled, and ask: “What would you say it is YOU DO around here?” 

So allow me to help: You see, it is your job as an IT consultant to make a compelling message for me as your client, it is your job to do it based on experience with the product and not what the vendor cookie cuttered for you, it is your job to tie it in as to make the most benefit for my current problem and fit my business process, it is your job to make it happen and support it in my environment.

Otherwise, what is it you do? Sit around and click Next/Finish all day?

Food for thought people. You cannot just be a reseller anymore or an MSP that only claims to keep computers up and clean of spyware because the big boys are coming and you need a competitive edge. And you need differentiation, and if you’re all going into a pitch with the same Microsoft canned page then you’ll be judged by the only differentiating factor you present – your price. And when you compete on price, you always lose.

* P.S. Regarding the commenters “struggle with Microsoft” – give it up sir. Microsoft’s answer to being used with competitive third party software has been, is, and always will be “We have a product that will do that, why don’t you use it instead?”

This week was supposed to be my first full week of work at the Atomic Tangerine studios.. Monday was a holiday, Tuesday was a sick day and week was more than half over by the time I finished hanging the whiteboard in the studio. And as I stood there, in front of my crooked whiteboard, doodling the week objectives that I could get done in two days, I started reminiscing about the very reason I moved downtown, to improve the interaction I have with my customers. In order for that to become reality I either need to clone myself or optimize the hell out of my daily tasks. I am not sure if I’m the only CEO that thinks about this and I’m sure I don’t have enough brilliant ideas to get this done, so I’m going to let you into my head and you let me know if you’re on the same page.

How do you improve interaction with your clients in a material way? I have two types of clients, technical and business driven. My technical customers include CIO’s, CTO’s, office IT administrators and network operators, they want documentation, howto’s, solution overviews. My business driven customers include IT Solution Providers, consultants and CEO’s who may have a problem in hand and want a blueprint of how to get it done the best way. When I start talking costs and productivity with the technical crowd the eyes start rolling, when I talk tech to the business crowd I see the bobblehead effect.

Point is, neither side wants to hear what the other side is concerned about.

But as this company grows beyond the infrastructure, development and services and now heading into hardware, the pressure I face to stay relevant to both crowds is rising.

It’s not an easy gig either. When these folks interact with me they expect professional delivery, courtesy, compassion… which in no small part makes Vladville an outlet for my alter ego and the reason its so god awful filthy and direct.

So.. over the past almost 5–6 months I’ve taken what I’ve learned on the road over the past two years from some of the very best people in the business and I’m slowly starting to implement it all. The “needs” analysis has been overwhelming to say the least but the challenge of remaining direct without adding in intermediaries (sales staff, partner managers, customer service reps and other relationship-inhibiting roles) is not an easy task.

I have two pieces of advice to offer based on my personal experience:

People want to hear from you. Not from your CTO, not from “The Genius Employee”, not from the bobblehead sales guy. They want to have some level of comfort in knowing that this company they trusted with a critical piece of their solution actually works on providing that solution.

Get a camera. I have a Microsoft face-tracking one that I record my blog posts (not Vladville) and PR pieces on and I do two exercises: ass-check and blabber-check. Ass-check is the feeling of sincerity I need from what I’m saying – if it looks canned or arrogant it gets chopped. The blabber-check is the scanning for answers to questions nobody asked – there is no need to ramble on about unrelated details when people just want an overview. Camera will unveil these personality (professional?) flaws immediately. You can flow face-to-face if you have any personality, you can’t judge body language, intimidation, concern or humor through the written word – you always come off like an ass, guaranteed.

The final bit of this puzzle is relevance. Who gives a s… what I think? If you asked ten of my clients if they cared, all 10 would say “none at all” because I am not addressing their complete and immediate concerns. This is one question that none of my peers could ever help with, so I looked at how one of the most irrelevant companies gets this done – Apple Computer. Apple has been irrelevant (market share) or on the verge of extinction for at least two decades yet they manage to get people to stop and pay attention to them whether they are launching a crippled iPhone or a more glossy laptop case. I’ve studied Apple very closely and seen just what makes Steve so powerful – They are about one thing and one thing only. All seemingly done by one guy. Seriously, Apple Computer is a one man show that at any time talks about only one product. Go to their web site – easy, they released an OS. Now, go to Microsoft’s – holy clustercfuck, mobile phones, office, Live Search, articles, screen savers, livecare, Silverlight? What is this page designed for, a cow inflicted by ADD? Now, guess which company is more successful..

Point is, Apple makes the audience care about what they are talking about, whereas I am about whatever you want me to be right now. While the hooker approach works in person, indirectly via the web (newsletter, video, podcast) you pick a story and beat the crap out of it. I chose to copy Apple. I feel it is the only way for people to stop and hear you out, because anyone will spend 10 seconds to get your take from your area of expertise – but they won’t spend 30 seconds to hear the top 10 list.

How do you stay relevant in your customers face? Food for thought…

One of the most frustrating things I do for living is troubleshooting mail delivery. Not because it’s incredibly frustrating and almost never my fault, but because I tend to get pwned by the most ridiculous “gotchas” of the SMTP.

Of the items that I probably deserve a Darwin Honorable Mention award for is troubleshooting delivery for an expired domain name, for a mail server that had the SMTP service stopped, that had the IP address changed, that had the letter 0 or O in the domain name and they just blurred together.

So today I set myself up for another “documentation writing” day and I have to say that I enjoy it. Writing about the products I’ve designed makes me realize how braindead some of our process is, nothing sounds quite so stupid than when you read it back to yourself. It also gives me ideas on how to improve the service, add in some gizmos that could help cut out a lot of time from troubleshooting.

Today, I proudly bring you the OWN Guide for Troubleshooting ExchangeDefender Delivery. Even if you are not an ExchangeDefender customer (come on!) the guide is general and verbose enough to give you an idea how to troubleshoot mail flow, diagnose issues with SMTP servers, create sample email messages from the command prompt.. I really hope you like it.

At the very worst you’ll learn how to install the telnet client for Microsoft Vista / 2008 Server from the command prompt.

.. and I ain’t him.

Not a day goes by that I don’t talk or chat with someone that doesn’t say “I miss you doing ___”, fill in the blank for “saying it how it is”, “the SBS show”, “calling out Microsoft”, “how-to guides”, “video blogs” and so on. To be completely honest, I miss doing those things as well but every time I even think about doing those things again for even a second I remember the hell that people put me through when I was doing them. When is the new show coming out? Can I use your videos for my presentation? Do you think you can help me with this guide? Can you write about this? Can you believe Microsoft did that? … so on and so forth … but I think what finally broke the camels back is that people were under this impression that I was being compensated for it all, community = profit, kickbacks and whatnot, so the public had the right to demand and expect these commercial benefits even though it wasn’t willing to do anything for me. You hear the “Oh, we do business with your competitors, but why aren’t you doing all your freebies anymore, my employees really got a lot out of it” a few hundred times and the passion kind of burns up. Not to mention that in a very big way, Microsoft has worked very hard over the years to address the problems I’ve had with them - SBSC is pretty much the crown jewel of the partner program, Action Pack distribution is being controlled, piracy is less and less of an option, patching has gotten a hell of a lot better in just the past year and SPFs are being eliminated through certification requirements for software, logos, freebie programs and events. So from the purely self-interested point of view, I am quite content - I am not getting the abuse or unnecessary stress and my largest partner got its s… together making me more profitable.

So I’m good. Thanks!

There is a problem though, there is a need for a new messiah of SMB, someone that is going to yell about the SMB problems without regard for relationships, feelings and consequences to make this a better place for everyone. Oh, and s/he must not make any money or work for any organization or in any way commercially benefit (sellout). The angry masses need a voice damnit, are you interested? Here is a brief description of job requirements:

1. Must be fearless
You need to relentlessly offer the opinion of your constituency with complete disregard for what your words and actions do to the others. No thinking about the job you might not get because of being critical, not thinking about the role you may not get to talk to until they are promoted out of it, no consideration at all how you will dilute the potentially important issues because you’re bringing up every little insignificant one.

2. Must be independant
You must do this of your own free will and on your dime. No associations, no company sponsorships, no company behind you. This is an honor, not an opportunity.

3. Must not ever make any money. Ever. Sellout!
You must never take money, from anyone, because that would make this a job and if its your job to voice my opinions I feel no need to have any respect for you or support anything you do because after all, it’s your job.

4. Must be influential
You must be influential, as in, you must be seen everywhere, with everyone, quoted for everything and offering your opinion when nobody asked for it.

5. Must handle stress
When people kick you in the balls, you must smile at them. God forbid you say something negative about them, you will be criticized, derided and beaten up in public.

For a more detailed job description of the SMB messiah please email sbradcpa@pac..

Now, I’m sure you’re thinking of some choice four letter words about all of the above so I’m guessing that role is going to be vacant for a very long time. Sure, you could pay your way into an association and live under the impression that its executives aren’t just selling you to the highest bidder. You could also push the local user group leader to the edge and frustrate him/her to the point that they blow up on someone at Microsoft / LPI / Dell, etc..

Maybe, just maybe.. Nah. You wouldn’t be interested. It’s far too risky. Nah. Ok, Ok, you beat it out of me. Maybe, just maybe… you could grow a pair of balls and voice your concern out loud? No no, not to me - I meant out loud. Like.. I dunno. A web page of some sort. That you could easilly update? That you could tie back to your identity or company or whatever person/organization is actually being affected enough to bring this opinion into the open? What’s that thing called… You know, when you have something on your mind, something you’re dying to say, something you wish could affect the people… That feeling like you could make a difference? Involvement? Nah.. Courage? Nah..

V  O  I  C  E

So say it out loud, or shut the fuck up. Your call.

It’s Friday, and I figured it was as good of a time for a guest post as any. This time, however, we have someone that obviously doesn’t get it. But that’s not all, while this guy seems to be in touch with whats going on, he also appears completely ignorant of the fundamental change that has happened to the world of business. That fundamental change, in case you have not recognized it yet, is that the customer is in charge, not the corporation.

I’ll offer you his loosely paraphrased thesis, though I encourage you to read it in its entirety:
“CEO’s that ask their customers and partners for advice in public are weak “community CEO’s” whose openness leads the customer to lose faith in the product and leave the company staff without confidence in their leader.”

He goes on to further insinuate not only that the feedback should not be solicited at all, but should also only come from peers/equals and compensated third parties. Doing it any other way makes for a Community CEO who projects a weak image of the company to its customers, weak leadership to its staff and overall lack of leadership ability. He cements his opinion by citing that he has never seen a Fortune 100 CEO ask for public advice on how to run their company.

I must admit, he makes a very valid point. For aspiring entrepreneur class of 1907, that is.

Welcome to 2007. In this day and age, the companies that make it big are the companies that are in tune with their customer, their partner and their community. The good ol’ boy club of business leadership, behind the closed doors with lit cigars contemplating the collective stupidity of the consuming public, with no regard for rules, fairness or ethics… well… those days are gone, long gone, and the days of business decisions behind closed doors without public input are numbered. Those that dilude themselves with the illusion that they are not almost entirely driven by the customer are on the way out. Those that embrace their clients and open their practices are winning.

I have many (many, many, many, many) coleagues that feel the exact opposite way. To them, only the nice things are voiced out loud, the dirty laundry is kept hidden, far, far away where it is ignored because I guess they think nobody will figure it out eventually. The public image is only a positive, beautiful, glowning one meant to hug you with one hand while reaching into your pocket with the other. Yet, they are surprised when it backfires.

So, let me offer you my thesis: People don’t give a damn about you, your opinions or leadership skills. They do business with you because you have a product that fits their needs and the more that product fits their needs, the more involved they are in the process, the more they understand the outcome and leverage it to their benefit. Even if its full of holes and shortcomings, people will find a sense of belonging in it, spread it for you, offer others help with using it…They become product fans but they do so because of the product and the process, not YOU. It is not about you. It’s all about the customer:

Customer is king.
Customer has a choice.
Customer can choose the status quo that has always taken them for granted, abused and irrelevant, that has constantly been in trouble and caught red handed over and over….. or
Customer can choose a company that is open and willing to listen to its feedback.

Not only do the Community CEOs work, they are the only ones people want to work with/for.

You have no idea how often I am asked to reserve myself in these blog posts, to not talk about certain things, to sweep some things under the rug, to not say anything bad about Microsoft as to damage our relationship, to not say anything too good about them either because I sound like a fanboy, to not talk about the upcoming features because people will take them away, to refrain from snide remarks and just be the happy go lucky Vlad who can only be honest behind the closed doors, sweeping the ugliness under the rug so everyone can live in a happy, but dishonest/unrealistic/nonexistant, harmony. And I ignore them. Proudly. Loudly.

Yet my company grows exponentially beause my focus is not on what people think… because only people that get compensated based on what people think of them are the beggars who want people to feel sorry for them. I choose to focus on delivering what people want, and I’m damn proud to ask the people what they want because its ultimately the clients that pay the bills, not my fan club.

Now… Do you finally get Vladville?

One of the worst things in blogging (aside from the constant, unrelenting abuse and hate mail you subject yourself to) is dealing with SPAM. Here you are just talking openly about whatever and someone tries to make money off of it. Low…

I’ve gone out of my way to kill the spammers. First, I only allow comments by registered users and registered users only receive a password to the email address they provide at registration. This nearly eliminates comment spam, I may have had one junk message in the past year.

Second, I absolutely neutered the trackback SPAM. These are the fake comments you see on Vladville that say “Mike said this: ” followed by my post contents. What I have essentially done to neutralize these monkeys is removing the hyperlink to their URLs, so even though they SPAM me, it gets them nowhere and just sends more links to my blog.

I kind of make a living killing spammers so this goes a little beyond the lone annoyance, its outright emasculating. So I’m sitting here in the atomic tangerine lab trying to come up with some replicable pattern that I can use. Most trackback SPAM plugins rely on curl to check if the offending web page has the direct link to my blog post. For pretty much everyone, that seems to be the case. So here is about the only thing I have come up with so far:

All trackback SPAM has the full post URL in it. The page also quotes, partially, my blog post and attributes it to someone else. I am intercepting the URL, downloading it with curl, stripping out all the HTML and running preg_match between the two posts.

Because all HTML and punctuation is ignored, it should be pretty easy to find a pattern match over at least 100 characters.

For the most part, nobody quotes paragraphs and paragraphs of text in a blog post, they merely link to the article and offer their point of view on it. Let’s see how it goes, right now I am just logging the matches and not discarding them automatically.

Off topic… I tried this too:

Most trackback spam happens within minutes of the post going live. It is almost safe to say that nobody would have read, thought about and produced a post referencing me within let’s say 30 minutes of my blog post. Something that automated either has no life at all or is a spambot.

If you have a better idea, I’m all ears…

P.S. I killed the monkey-glide as a courtesy to Katie. As you may have noticed, there is some more AJAX happening on Vladville, this time just a stupid CSS trick that brings in additional navigation without cluttering the page — just click on the monkey tale thats right above my head on the top right corner of my page where it says “Whats on Vlad’s Mind?” - (In my best Stewie voice) Maybe I’m thinking maybe the wife needs to take up more blogging and less bitching about how inconvenient her husbands blog is? Write a compelling narrative about the javascript timeouts and smooth scrolling with jquery? Something that will make us all root for the protagonist? Maybe put in some life experiences in the plot? Nah, nah.

Don’t you just love it when you post something that’s meant to help people but it just backfires with even more questions? Such is this morning, woke up to a dozen emails about last nights post.. by the way, thanks to emailing them directly to me instead of following the proper support route (support.ownwebnow.com) or posting a blog comment where someone other than the CEO of the company could help you. Real considerate.

But, as a public service, here are a few background pieces that I hope help the spectators:

Why not just always use ISP’s SMTP server?

Because it gets hard to manage and its even worse in multihomed offices. Nowadays very few roles in business are tied to the desk, people are mobile and they rely on more mobility. They are two different things, allow me to explain. People tend to be more mobile, meaning they will do the work from home, from office, from the production plant, from the client site in Hong Kong, from an Verizon Wireless link and so on. They also rely on mobility, in terms of devices and gadgets that receive email. Yesterday we had a support ticket from someone that wanted to receive email alerts in their car because they spend most of their day driving from site to site dropping off equipment and they needed the settings to bypass port 25.

As people become more mobile, and rely more on mobility products, single desk, single ISP and single IP address rules go out the window.

Why not just use RPC-over-HTTP?

While RPC over HTTP is a technically valid solution to the SMTP problem, it is a feature of Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office, something that most companies cannot afford and even if they can, they do not have the means to justify the expense. Yeah, I know, I know - the productivity, the scheduling, the TCO bull can pour through the chimney on this argument, we are talking about companies that spend less than $120 a year in TOTAL on their email infrastructure and communications and that includes filtering and A/V. Could they benefit from Outlook? 50/50 - some of these roles are simply correspondence roles where minimum wage workers just crunch through the sales and fulfillment.

Remember, premium solutions are there for premium problems. The ability to just send and receive email reliably and securely is not worth a few hundred dollars a year for a vast majority of companies out there.

Why bother with SSL/TLS?

Every time you receive email from a POP3 server you are passing your username and password in clear text. Yep. You read that right. Most people stick with just plain login/pass because its easy and requires very little effort.

Same goes for webmail. We provide secure sockets on all our services but most people don’t use them. When we tried to redirect to SSL sites automatically we faced a huge backlash from partners and customers who did not want to see our hostname in the address bar. I suppose having people read your email is more appealing than seeing mail1.ownwebnow.com instead of mail.ihaveaverysmallpenisandliveforvanity.cc

ISP filtering traffic, I am outraged, where is the news coverage?

ISP’s own the network, you just buy the right to use it. A right that they can at any time restrict. In a very big way, I support the ISPs right to filter their network traffic. Most of the SPAM nightmares come from zombies on cable/DSL connections that do nothing but spew SPAM. If they were policed effectively by the ISP there would be no need for port 25 restrictions, however, I’d rather see the providers kill SMTP access and force people to migrate to secure SSL access on alternate ports.

How can I find out if my ISP is filtering my SMTP traffic?

Just telnet to mail1.ownwebnow.com on port 25. If you get the connection with our banner, you’re open. If you see anything else, or if  you get an error or a timeout or a refused connection, your ISP is filtering SMTP.

Is SMTP AUTH mechanism important?

Not really. You can either authenticate explicitly using SMTP Auth or you can just use the POP3-before-SMTP mechanism that is native to the way the mail agents operate. Basically, when you hit Send & Receive, your client first connects to us and authenticates with the POP3 server to download email. Once authenticated, the IP address is programmed into the relay for a preset amount of time, meaning you can relay mail without explicitly authenticating to the server. Pretty easy.

Now, lets say you had a copier on the network that was also sending scans to your desktop or remote office. In this scenario SMTP authentication is required and must be set explicitly because there is no POP3-before-SMTP mechanism in place for the copier, it just sends mail and expects it to go through.

What about IMAP and IMAP-SSL?

They are both supported and as a matter of fact, our new webmail (https://mail1.ownwebnow.com/webmail2) relies on the IMAP protocol to manage folders and such. However, in the field only a tiny percentage of users relies on IMAP and I did not feel that was a big enough of a cause to document completely. Same goes for IMAP as for POP3, always use securely, always use SSL, blah blah.

What is the deal with 2525 and 25252?

They are just random ports we chose to bind our SMTP server to in case your ISP is not prohibiting SMTP traffic specifically, but just using the port filter on port 25. In this case, just changing the port number from 25 to 2525 without making any other changes will do it. While you should definitely implement everything I mentioned in the guide, if “it worked yesterday, it’s broken today, and we didn’t make any changes” (if I had a penny every time I heard that lie) then just a change from 25 to 2525 or 25252 will likely do it.

Why are you using TLS for SMTP in Outlook and SSL in Windows Live?

Let me take my MCSE hat off. When I tried it with SSL in Outlook, the connection failed. It was late at night and I really didn’t want to find out why it didn’t work.