It is always good to hear from our potential who eventually become friends, even without a deal!

Email users are smart nowadays. Your email newsletters are most likely to be ignored if you are trying to hardsell your services. Why?

Everyone knows how to Google or Bing for information. They find product review more resourceful than your newsletter. Well, we are not going to go into details of how you can make your newsletter more productive. That is something you can try and measure on your own.

Yes, what tool to use?

GroupMail is one of the mass mail software you can use. What makes it stand out is the ability to connect to any external database to retrieve an up-to-date email lists.

Groupmail, email marketing and newsletter software

To do that, you need to install MySQL Connector/ODBC driver. Add a new data source in ODBC Data Source Manager (Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Data Sources). During setup, leave the password field empty.

ODBC Data Source Administrator

Next, setup the Database Connection Manager in GroupMail. It is pretty straight forward. Then, setup a new Group and choose Connect via External Database. Groupmail supports SQL query to pull out email addresses you want.

Manage Database Connections

The 5-days Continuus' email migration walk through

Has your email service provider ever made you feel like ripping your hair out? I bet it has. Well, our client, Continuus Consulting, certainly has had enough when they came to us for a solution. They’ve lost emails lost to cyberspace, received emails 2 weeks too late… you name the problem; they had it!

One particularly distressing episode occurred when they lost the opportunity to bid for a tender, due to an email that arrived a week later. By the time they got it, the invitation to bid had closed, and there went their chances for the big bucks. The worst thing was, when they demanded answers, the technical support blamed power outages and virus attacks, but didn’t bother to provide alternatives or solutions.

Well, we firmly believe that no one should have to suffer this kind of heartache or lose their sanity over something that’s supposed to make life and work easier. So, we helped Continuus Consulting switch to a new email system, and they can’t be happier with the results.

I’m proud to say that our teams worked seamlessly together and the email migration took just 5 days to complete. Let me walk you through what happened:

Day 1: Thursday, May 21, 2009

02:58 PM: Continuus Consulting subscribed to our email services online. We acknowledge the order immediately and waited for payment. Meanwhile, our migration team assessed the time required, the complexity of the project, and the current email environment.

03:30 PM: The client made the payment and filled up the payment acknowledgment form. Our migration team then outlined the overall migration plan and made a list of the information required.

04:30 PM: Our migration team completed the setup with new DNS addresses. The client told their existing service provider to update their email domain with the new DNS addresses.

11:30 PM: Our migration team received a list of the client’s existing email users and began setting up mailboxes in the new email server.

Day 2: Friday, May 22, 2009

03:54 PM: The client informed our migration team about the completion of the DNS change request submitted earlier.

05:30 PM: Our migration team confirmed that all preparations were ready. All we had to do was wait for the actual migration, which was scheduled on Sunday at 8 pm.

Day 3: Saturday, May 25, 2009

We all took the day off.

Day 4: Sunday, May 24, 2009

08:00 PM: Our migration team changed the Mail Exchange (MX) record and performed a final live checking. They then sent the client email confirming that the migration had been successfully completed.

Day 5: Monday, May 25, 2009

09:00 AM: The client returned back to work and changed to their new email setting by referring to a step-by-step guide that we gave them earlier.

09:37 AM: The client started using the new email service without any problems!

Here’s what they had to say:

“Thank you for the simple instructions you provided. The new email service for my company has been a success. All my outlook users are able to send and receive emails as usual.”

Another happy ending, brought to you by 1.com.my!

What began as a flawless email migration plan was delayed a week longer for one of our new customer, a listed institution that is well known in the financial and banking sector in Malaysia thus proving Murhpy’s Law as valid.

An oversight in the migration plan overlooked the delay in the domain name transfer process. In layman’s term, the transfer of domain name from the old Registrar to the new Registrar put us in a deadlock situation where we were not able to modify the DNS addresses to follow the agreed migration deadlines. Our original plan assumed that we were able to modify the DNS addresses first before performing the Registrar Transfer.

The migration was postponed and took place 5 days later. Though the interruption did not affect the email services, but it definitely knocked a dent on our reputation as one of the leading provider in corporate email solution.

We extend our gratitude as well to the client’s previous email hosting vendor professionalism that agreed to extend their account expiry to allow for the domain name transfer process to complete. With everyone’s cooperation we managed to roll out a new escalation plan immediately as backup.

Luck was on our side as the domain name transfer process came through even as we were preparing to activate our agreed escalation plan before the deadline.

“Glad everything worked and the transfer process was smooth. None of our staff are even aware of the migration.” “We cannot afford any disruption in our email communication as it is a critical service to our daily business operation”” said the client’s IT Person who was responsible for the client’s email hosting service.

The client’s IT Person is definitely one of the most resourceful and responsive guy we have ever worked with. He took extra effort to understand the technical part of the email migration and personally configured all of the client’s PC equipment are configured to use the new email server addresses.

Since our new client is a listed financial institution, strict measures was taken to make sure we comply with their stringent email requirements and that we make available the resources to support their required level in terms of maintenance and troubleshooting of any problems with their new email hosting service.

Even after the migration was complete, our email hosting team continued to monitor the status of their ‘email transactions’. We made sure their registration information for their domain name is current, as well as their email client configurations are correct. Additionally, we pointed their domain name to our fixed IP address to reduce the chances of their emails from being marked as [SPAM].

“What else can I say, ‘Muchos Gracias’. I didn’t know it could create a problem.”

It was a short notice and we have only, strictly speaking- a weekend, to get both web and email hosting or Premier Wood migrating to us.

Premwood products are sold to more than 10 countries!

Well, this is definitely not a Mega-transfer but it is definitely not an excuse for our migration team to handle it loosely. Less than 10 mailboxes to be transfered, as well as the website!

I have heard those terrible experience of my friends during their migration. The irresponsible new host gave them only a login to the hosting control panel, without any plan or help to setup their new email or website.

We started by retrieving all the important information we need during migration. A migration plan was drafted and sent to our client before actual migration. Our client just sit back and when they have came back to work on Monday- No Monday-blue, but another successful migration and happy clients!

The Contact us form is not working, long before the migration. Through not in our scope, our migration team has fixed that as well, knowing solving problem is more important than pointing our finger.

Right after we have sent an email to all our email customers about how to retrieve lost email, we have came to a narrow rescue to Felicia, of Red Energy. She was kind enough to share the whole story, after the incident before her boss find out about this, kidding :)

1. Can you share with us what is your company doing and some background of yourself?

Red Energy is a trading and engineering services company, established in 1983. Our company’s vision is to be the leader of heavy industrial solutions provider and to deliver responsive and reliable customized solutions. I’ve been working with the company for more than 16 years and I find that the jobs are challenging. I like dancing, especially Line Dane and Belly dance and also travelling. You can visit YouTube- Senipadu for Line dance videos and it is for educational purposes.

2. Tell us more about the whole incident, and how did it happen?

Well, when I was checking my boss e-mail, I thought it is my personal account, I used to delete all the mails from the Trash Folder. After I’ve deleted all the mails, I realized this account doesn’t belongs to me. Ha! HA!

3. What is the first thing that come to your mind after you have accidently deletes those email?

Oh! First thing came to my mind was the mail sent by you. “When someone accidentally deletes an important email…..”

4. Do you have anything to share with our readers to prevent such incident to happen again?

Don’t worry, we have 1.com.my, they will restore all the deleted data. but don’t over do it, I believe they are busy too.

5. What is your experience of dealing with our support team during the email restoration?

Excellent, you have done a very good job.

Satisfied customers are everything to us, our core business. See, we don’t believe in putting 2-person on shift, answering the so-called 24×7 support line can solve your problem, if it’s not by heart.

1. Rule number one, updated customer information. The registered contact information serves as a form of verification, receiving updates and point-of-contact when things go wrong.

Updated customer information

2. Recurring services is a cycle of billing & renewing, which should not go wrong! The result, some customers stay with us since day one :)

Renewal records

3. Customer choose what to renew and make payment in once. This is particularly helpful if you have more than one service with different expiry date.

Next year renewal

4. Anything can go wrong when the ownership of your domain name are not properly managed. Check this out Retrieving A Hijacked Domain Name

Updated WHOIS information

5. All our email servers are monitored every 15 minutes. Compare uptime.

Email server uptime monitoring

6. Our geographically-dispersed DNS servers used for all our email hosting customers.

Monitoring DNS servers' uptime

7. Updates sent to all customers by email.

Email notification and sharing of email related tips

8. Press release on our corporate website.

Official press release

9. Email hosting blog that talk about email tips and tricks!

Email Hosting Blog

10. Solving your problem in shortest possible time, this is our core business always! Our customer uses our Contact us form that runs 24×7, including holidays and weekends.

Solving your problem in shortest time

People are talking about our website. Some find it easy to navigate, while others have problem to even tell where we have kept the pricing of our email hosting services. Wait, why most of the pages is plain and hardly you can find a cute little pear popped out in the page.

We hear you! See, instead of ‘Hey, buy from us…’ kind of approach, we do have quite a huge amount of content related to our email hosting services. Please go through the following posts we have handpicked from our Lost City, presenting to you in a more conventional way.

Convince-me or cheeky hard-sell section (aka Why us?)
1. 100% Uptime Email Hosting Solution
2. Over 70,000 businesses trusts our commitment to email!
3. Uptime report of various email hosting companies in Malaysia

Reference plus little bit of success stories… (aka Portfolio)
1. Microlink Email Migration
2. Interview with Muzaffar
3. Amtek changed email domain
4. Zero-downtime email migration for Furniweb!
5. Businss email solution for Khind

Techy section, from MX to Port 587… (aka Technical Specs)
1. Group Lists
2. Webmail Supports New Identity Now
3. Noteworthy Webmail
4. Solving the Email Problem for You
5. Setting up email software
6. Webmail Mobile
7. Webmail 6.6 - Speed Improvements
8. My email gone!

What’s next? (aka, Anything free?)
Check out our Email Hosting Blog for free tips to help you plan your email and reduce your email cost.

(We need some little encouragement like you do, for what we have considered, a huge change- post your comment and share with us)