E-mailing has become the revolutionary step in how companies and organizations choose to keep their partners, friends and clients informed and up-to-date. Using e-mail solutions like GroupMail has certainly simplified the job and it is very user-friendly.

Here’s how the application can be configured, once installed on the user’s machine.

Step 1:
Open and run Group Mail from your installed machine. Go to Tools > Account Manager

Go to Tools > Account Manager

Step 2:
Click on the “New” button to start configuration. A window titled “Account Properties” as shown on the right region will appear.

Account Properties

Step 3:
Key in the information as shown below under the “User Information” tab.

Name for Account: Any Name
Name: Your Name (appear in recipient’s email)
Organization : -
Email Address : noreply@yourdomain.com (appear in the From Address)
Reply-to Address : noreply@yourdomain.com

User Information

Step 4:
Navigate the tab to “Delivery Options” and key in the information as shown below.

Delivery Options: Standard
SMTP Server: smtp.emailsrvr.com
Tick “Require Authentication”

Connections: 1
Pause every 1 message for 30 seconds

Delivery Options

Step 5:
Click on the “Setup” button for Authentication Settings

Tick: Use SMTP Authentication (outbound)
Type: AUTH-LOGIN (Default)
Username: noreply@yourdomain.com
Password: Your Password

Authentication Settings

Step 6:
Click on the “Advanced” button for Advanced Email Settings.

Key in the information as shown below:

SMTP Port: 587
POP3 Port: 110

Note: Do not tick “Server requires an SSL connection” | other settings remain default

SMTP & POP3 Advanced Email Settings

Step 7:
Click on the “OK” button on the Advanced Email Settings and start the email test by clicking “Test” button.

Specify a Test Message To: email address:

Testing Email Settings

Step 8:
Upon successful sending of the test email, the following screen will be visible stating the status as “Success!”

Email Testing Succesful

Having successfully configured the GroupMail and running email tests, we can now proceed to managing the groups. Like the name of the software, GROUP MAIL, it simply means that it sends out e-mails in groups or in bulk. There are 2 recommended methods:

Type 1: GroupMail Format (Default) – Recipients are stored internally
Type 2: External database – Recipient information is retrieved from an external Database System

Step 1:

At the top tabs, click on “Groups” then navigate to the left panel, select “New Group”, and will be prompted to choose the Group Type.

Creating New Group

Step 2: (GroupMail Format – Default)

Selections of Group Type

Step 3:
Give the field a name, type and its size.
[Type of text varies from Date, Text, Number, Currency, Boolean, Unicode)

Field Customization

Step 4:
Select the field name that represents the recipients’ email addresses. Usually, the check box below will not be ticked as duplicated email addresses will not be stored. It act as a validation feature for redundant e-mail detection.

Specify Email Field

Step 5:
Lastly, give the group created a name.

Name the Group

Step 1:
Choose the preferred group to be modified (Double-Click)

Selecting Database Group to be Modified

Step 2:
Specify the database connection and define group contents by advanced data selection and qualification (Using SQL Query)

Modify Database Group

Step 3:
Writing the SQL Query by selecting the preferred columns in the database table.

SQL Query

Read more to find out about setup the Database Connection Manager in GroupMail

We would suggest letting our team of professionals handle the housekeeping of your mailing list. What is housekeeping? Well, it is an action whereby outdated email addresses are cleaned out. You might have noticed it yourself when you receive a rejected notification from specific e-mail address. But first, let’s learn how to send a personalized e-mail using GroupMail.

Step 1:
Start composing email messages with easy-to-use function like this below. Inserting a merge fields for name will simply look like this !*NAME*! | This !*NAME*! will be replaced by respective names specified in the group when sending to the particular recipient.

Select Message tab > New > Start composing

Step 2:
Writing the email message. GroupMail supports HTML email too.

Composing the E-mail Message

That’s all!!!

Here’s a couple of question that might arise.

1. Now, when do we do housekeeping? Like it was said, when the information are not meaningful and out-of-date
2. How do we know when the email is not sent to the recipient(s)?  Here’s how a sample looks like:

Delivery Status Notification | Rejected caused by typo error in the mail domain. Should be "yahoo" instead of "yaho"

To rectify the problem from recurring, perform a clean up / update to the email address.

One-step Action:
Go into the preferred group storing the e-mail address; locate it and delete / update
Update : update details (user exist)
Delete : remove (user does not exist)

Modify Recipient's Details

Compliance overview

Our email archiving provides quick deployment of email archiving for all government agencies regardless of their email platform. With secure capture of all emails and full text indexing of emails/attachments, freedom of Information requests are fulfilled with limited expenditure of IT resources.

The archiving service indexes all message components: Header, Body, and Attachments. All of these components are easily searchable through a secure web based user interface and retrievable to standards-based formats like .pst, .pdf, text, mime, etc.

Malware injection attack is spreading like wildfire these days, and countless websites have been affected. The attack is done via a compromised FTP, and many believe that the virus can actually “sniff out” FTP passwords and send it back to the hacker. The hacker then uses your FTP password to access your website and add malicious iframe coding to infect other visitors who browse your website.

Malware injection warning sign by Google Chrome

Most web browsers will put up a notice when they’ve detected malware in your website. This prevents other people from unknowingly downloading the malware. If you’d like to check if your website has been infected, use the Website Security Check from Unmask Parasites.

Security report from Unmask Parasites (beta)

You might also like to take the following preventive measures to protect your website from malware:

1. Upgrade your Adobe Reader to the latest version
2. Install anti-virus software like Malwarebytes and Comodo
3. Use SFTP instead of FTP
4. Remove all malicious coding from your website
5. Upgrade to latest WordPress if you have a self-hosted Blog
6. Change your FTP password

For further reading, check out Hidden iframe injection attacks

Managing DNS (Domain Name Server) is part of the scope of work covered in our domain name management services. Our DNS servers are hosted on geographically-dispersed networks, because we’re aware that one’s email and web services can be badly affected once a DNS server goes down.

Email can be marked as Spam without Reverse DNS

Each domain name has their own “pointing” recorded in a Zone file hosted in the DNS servers. Those records are used to tell your email where it should be routed and how visitors are to be directed to your website. Besides standard pointing, we do provide additional services such as Failover Support and Critical DNS Servers.

How does the failover service work?

The failover monitoring service works when you have two or more web servers running the same (or similar) website.

1) First, you’ll need the IP address of your domain and get it working. Then you add the failover monitor.

2) The failover monitor watches your web server(s) by hitting a URL you’ve specified and looking for text in the results.

3) When the system detects that one of them has an error, and the others don’t, it pulls the IP address out of the list.

4) If none of the IPs respond, and a failure IP/URL is defined, it points the site to the failure IP/URL

5) If the system can’t get to all of the IPs, then it assumes that the fault is its own connection and it takes no action

6) If any of your IPs come back online, they’ll be restored

This effectively and safely keeps your site online, even if one of your web servers is down. The average failure detection time is 10 minutes, but the time varies depending on the speed of your site and the nature of the failure. Recovery times are faster, averaging 5 minutes.

Failover support control panel

In a recent case, we helped Infinity Logistics to configure the failover support for their in-house hosted email server. We’re proud to say that it works perfectly now.

If you want to retrieve your email with your iPhone, you have two options. Firstly, iPhone Mail allows you to access your email account in a way similar to email clients such as Internet Mail, Outlook or Outlook Express. Here’s how you do it:

Setup email on the iPhone 3GS & iPhone 4

On the Settings screen, tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”. Go to Add Account and select “Other” from the Welcome to Mail screen. Select “Add Mail Account”

Welcome to Mail screen

1) Name: Any Name
2) Address: Enter your email address.
3) Password: Enter your password for your email account.
4) Description: Any Description

Click “Next” and select “IMAP”

On the Incoming Mail Server screen, press “Enter”
1) Host Name: imap.emailsrvr.com
2) User Name: Enter your full email address as your user name
3) Password: Enter the password from your email account

On the Outgoing Mail Server screen, press “Enter”
1) Host Name: smtp.emailsrvr.com
2) User Name: Enter your full email address as your user name.
3) Password: Enter the password from your email account.

Click “Next” again. Your iPhone will try to verify your settings. Do not panic if you see a “Cannot connect using SSL” warning. Choose setting up your email account WITHOUT SSL.

When everything is ready, press on Advanced and make sure you have the following settings:
1) Use SSL: Off
2) Authentication: Password
3) Server Port: 143

Attention to iPad user, please reboot your device after setup. Or else, your new account will not be found inside Mail. Hold Home and On/Off button for more than 4 seconds to reboot your device.

One of our customers reported that one of their emails had gone missing. First, we verified if the sender’s mail server was working perfectly and not holding that particular email in queue. Second, we checked the recipient’s Spam folder in their Webmail, because emails are often intercepted and moved to the Spam folder.

To help our customer understand why the email from that particular sender was marked as Spam, we gave them the following step-by-step guide:

First, go to the Spam folder in your Webmail

Select the spam-marked email you wish to view

View the full header of the Spam-marked mail you wish to investigate further

View full header

The Couldmark Spam filtering system checks the sender’s email host for any incorrect configuration, previous spamming activities and any other things that makes this email suspicious.

Anything more than 6 Spam-Score are marked as Spam

To bypass this, check this out “Client host blocked?”

Our team member, Eunice, encountered a peculiar problem with her email recently. One of the emails she sent was returned with the following “error” message:

“Client host [210.187.79.36] blocked using pf-ip4tset.blagr.emailsrvr.com=127.26.0.2 (in reply to RCPT TO command)”

Our team figured out that the recipient’s mail server has been blacklisted. To get around this, all you need to do is add the recipient’s email address or domain to the “safe list”. But how do you do that exactly? Well, here’s how you’d do it through Webmail:

In your Webmail, go to Settings > Spam Settings > Safelist

Webmail's Spam Setting

Mark any message as NOT SPAM and it will be added to your safelist automatically

Safelist email automatically

Do it from the Control Panel for entire domain or individual user

Email Control Panel

Eunice said “The problem seems have solved already. Thank you very much. We will update u again.”

Need more help with this? Just leave us a comment and we’ll get back to a.s.a.p!

There’s no denying that emails are becoming more important these days, and having back up copies made of all incoming and outgoing messages can be crucial to your business. But, how can this be done?

The challenge is that the archive copies must be made easily retrievable at any time. The system must also be transparent and easy enough for email users to understand, so that they don’t have to worry about extra settings in their email clients or Webmail.

Rigel has just subscribed to this add-on; and our team set up the entire system for them in less than a day. Now they have peace of mind!

Rigel provides solutions for world-class hygienic environments!

One of your staff left, so the logical thing to do is to remove his/her email address to make room for your new staff, right? So what happens to the emails that are still being sent to the deleted email address?

This is a very good question that was asked by our friends from VT Group. The solution is quite simple– create an “Email Alias”. It is unlimited, free and most importantly, it forwards all email messages it gets, to one or a few email addresses.

Add new email alias in your email control panel

Quite some time ago, we founded an underground society with around 30 friends, many of whom are entrepreneurs, online business owners and grant recipients. We needed an email that could be easily remembered, and used by all members, so we came up with – friends@1.com.my. Any message sent to this email address will simultaneously be forwarded to all 30 members on the list. The list is protected, so that no one other than the authorised sender can use it. It IS an underground society after all!

Setup unlimited group list in your email control panel

One of our email users was planning to go on a holiday, so he activated the auto-reply vacation message through Webmail. When activated, an auto-reply message should be sent out to people who are sending him emails. Everything seemed to be working fine in the beginning, but then, it started to fail. No more vacation message! Panic, he filled up our Contact us form immediately to get help!

We informed him about the catch; our auto-reply system only sends the vacation message out once if it is from the same sender! We’re happy to say we fixed the glitch, and our client’s enjoying his vacation right now.

Each sender will receive only one auto-reply message

A Typical Web Development Project

So, it’s finally time for you to look into building an online presence for your company’s website? Or it’s about time that you revamp the website after hearing from your boss that website is looking really dull for the 999th times.

I would assume that you have a budget for your web development project. I wouldn’t go into how you should come up with this budget, but a budget would give the developer and yourself a rough idea on the scale of the development. You cannot have a RM799.00 budget and ask for everything under the sun. A budget would also allow you to prioritize what features to include in your website, and what features should be implemented in the subsequent phase of your web development pipeline.

Ok, after the Management has approved with your budget, what should you do next? Naturally, the next step is to find a competent developer who can deliver the project fast, cheap and beyond expectations, as unrealistic as that might sound.

So, you post up the jobs, ask around your friends who’s in the IT business and do a search on Google for ‘Malaysia cheap and good web design companies’ or ‘cheap web designers’ or even ‘freelancers who work for free’. And after that, you shortlist 5 of them and asked each them to give you a quote. And you waited for a few days before all the quotes come in, and after looking at the figures you decided to meet with 2 of the cheapest one, and one that quoted the highest (just because you were curious why this particular designer is so different from the rest).

And after interviewing each of them, you finally nail down one company, let’s call them Super SEO Sdn Bhd, and the project begins by paying the web development company a 15% down payment. The project usually begins with Super SEO collecting all the information that you want to put up on to the web for the world to see. All the annual reports, the magazine scans and all your interviews with the newspapers. Next, you also require Super SEO to come up with a few prototypes to give you the ‘look and feel’ of the design. As a matter of fact, you don’t really know what you want, but heck, you can always change your mind, right?

And so it goes on for a few weeks, with Super SEO proposing their revised color scheme for the Nth times, while you continue to browse at your competitors’ website to see what they’ve been up to lately, and to see if there’s any cool features that you might be able to ‘steal’ from them.

If all of the above sounds familiar to you, then you’re very likely to find yourself with a website that did not bring in any positive impact in your sales. Well, at least now your company has a website, and you can include the cool URL on your name card and ironically, other than the URL, there’s really nothing inside the website that you could really shout about to your potential visitor. You begin to wonder why did you spend RM8,000 on the web development project.

My advice? Just get a domain name and have a single page with your company’s address on it. That will probably only cost you about RM150.00. Nothing to shout about either, but it’s going to have the same impact on your name card.

Hold it, now you’re saying that you are really, really serious about building your online presence and how else, other than the method explained above, can you go about it?

Who’s the Architect?

Here’s what I’ll propose, and I think this would definitely work much better than the commonly-used method illustrated earlier.

First, you must know what you want out of the website, and how the website will affect your business’s bottom line. No web developers on this planet can give you this answer, simply because they are just that- web developers. They know nuts about your business, and probably won’t be interested to listen to you brag about your rag-to-riches stories.

Contrary to what you may have been told, if you are going to build a website that works for you, the key architect of the site is none other than you and the people in your company. If it’s a revamp of your existing website, the feedbacks that you’ve gathered from previous visitors, clients and the web statistics will also be an important source of information in working out the blueprint of your web development project. You should be the person deciding the metrics you want to benchmark the website with. How many visitors are you expecting after the revamp? What keywords do you want to position your website with? Which languages do you think you should translate your site into? Which countries are most likely search about your industry and what kind of search engines do they use? Do you have a department in your company that would be able to tap into the company’s web resources and improve their service delivery?

And if you still think that your web developer is going to do all these for you, you’d better rethink your purpose of developing/revamping the website.

The Blue Print is All You Need

So, it’s really not rocket science. What I am really suggesting is that you need to first identify your web development’s need. Figure out the benchmarking metrics of your website and the conversion ratios you are hoping to accomplish. Let everyone in the company chip in and contribute in the planning phase. Get the blueprint of your project done and make changes whenever a better idea or suggestions come along. It’s 80% cheaper to change the features on the drawing board than after you’ve got your website up on the net.

It’s very tempting to hire a web developer based on their portfolio and their client base. Yes, these are important attributes which will help you determine whether they can deliver what you want, how you want it and when you want it. Yet, it’s even more important to engage a web developer who listens to your needs and can help to ensure your blueprint is realistic and achievable. An experienced web developer who can help you to come up with the final blueprint can also dramatically reduce your risk. The blueprint will usually only be a fraction of the entire project cost, but it’s also the foundation of the entire project. With this blueprint, you will have a clear idea of what to expect from the website and you can even bring around this blueprint to any web designing companies which can execute the blueprint for you, exactly the way you want it. Again, this can help to further reduce your development cost and also to ensure that you will not be ‘surprised’ with the end product.

Conclusion

A website is becoming one of the most important tools in an organization’s public communication strategy. You can deliver an impressive message by providing the information that your visitors are searching for with the least effort or you can be turning off potential customers with a few badly designed product purchasing forms.

Whatever it is, I would like to emphasize again my point: Your website is your business

Posted by Yowchuan, Meshio.com: A Case for Your Web Development Project