SoftCom Corporate Blog

It has been 100 days since I’ve taken over as CEO of SoftCom so I thought I’d give you a quick overview of my first hundred days at the helm. Before I take you through the highlights of the past few months, I’d like to say a few words about the genesis of SoftCom and how the name came about, as I get asked this question quite often.

It was 12 years ago that we embarked on this journey; a few friends from high school with a big dream. We were young, ambitious and ready to do whatever it took to succeed. However we were not quite sure exactly where to start. After a few days of discussions, a decision was reached. We were going to try our hand at web hosting, which was relatively new back then. It was meant to be one of the several technology services our founding group was going to pursue. With that decision behind us, we moved on to the next challenge, finding a name for our business. After some deliberation, the name SoftCom Technology Consulting emerged as the front runner, and was subsequently chosen as the name of the company. Collectively, we thought the name SoftCom was a good fit as it was the name of the computer club, which was instrumental in building our passion for technology. The “Technology Consulting” part was added to reflect our intention to offer an array of technology services.

As the business evolved, we realized providing web hosting services was our passion and that’s where we wanted to concentrate our efforts. At times, we felt our company name did not accurately reflect this and debated dropping the “Technology Consulting”, as well as acquiring a matching domain name. For one reason or another, the decision was always put off until later. That is, until last week. As of June 8, 2009, SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc. is no more. We have renamed the business as “SoftCom Inc.” and moved the web site to its new home at http://softcom.com.

The first order of business for us as we entered a new chapter in the history of SoftCom was to review our purpose and values. This was an arduous process but a necessary one to communicate the right message to our customers, partners and employees. I invite you to visit our “About Us” page to read about our Purpose & Values, and welcome any questions or comments you may have.

The next challenge for me was to fill the role I have long occupied as the head of Technology at SoftCom. I am very pleased to say we were lucky to find a perfect replacement in Mark Salerno, who is an industry veteran with 10+ years of experience in the web hosting space. Mark has most recently worked at Network Solutions as VP, Research and Development. He brings a wealth of subject matter expertise as well as years of executive management experience to SoftCom.

In addition to hiring Mark, we have brought on board Celal Ulgen as our Chief Marketing Officer. Celal is no stranger to SoftCom. As a matter of fact, he was one of SoftCom’s co-founders and we are thrilled to have him back. During his extended hiatus from SoftCom, Celal was quite busy making a name for himself as a marketer in the web hosting industry. Most recently he was involved in the Venture Capital markets focusing on infrastructure, e-commerce, and web services investments.

On the new development front, we have accomplished a number of different things. Just to name a few, we have launched mail2web.com Community Portal, wrapped up mail2web Live Exchange 2007 migrations and upgraded myhosting.com infrastructure. Many more exciting developments are in the pipeline, such as the impending mail2web.com re-launch slated for later this week and the long awaited control panel overhaul ready to kick-off in just a few weeks. We hope you will like the new mail2web.com design and would be generous to us with your constructive feedback. Please share your thoughts with us on the forums… We are listening.

As our journey continues, I will continue to write on this blog and bring you updates on the progress we are making as the new SoftCom, literally and figuratively. Stay tuned!

Thank You,

Turker Sokullu
CEO
SoftCom Inc.

Good day,

I wanted to take the time to inform you, as a valued customer of SoftCom, of some recent changes in our management. Tony Yustein has,  effective immediately,  resigned as President and Chief Executive Officer of SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc. We wish Tony success in his future endeavors.

Co-founder and former Vice President of Operations and Software Development, Turker Sokullu has been appointed as a director and the President, Chief Executive Officer, and Secretary of SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc. Firat Eren has also been appointed as a director and the Chairman.

These changes in management  will not affect the day-to-day operations of our company. We will continue to provide the same quality and service you have come to expect from SoftCom and look forward to the future with hope as we continue to work for our valued customers.

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Greetings,

It has been more than a year since we introduced the Softcom corporate blog. In that time we have made many changes and improvements to our products and services for both mail2web.com and myhosting.com. The response to the blog has for the most part been very positive. That is why we have added two new blogs, one for each of our brands.

Under mail2web.com we offer both free and premium services. The main products we sell are Microsoft Hosted Exchange ® email and the business collaboration platform Windows SharePoint Services ® (WSS 3.0). The address for the blog is http://blog.mail2web.com/

The myhosting.com brand is our shared hosting platform. We offer hosting of both Microsoft Windows ® and Linux platforms as well as POP3/IMAP4 email hosting. The blog address for myhosting.com is http://blog.myhosting.com/

We will still continue to occasionally post to the Softcom blog about broad issues and things that are related to the company as a whole. We will for the most part post entries on the mail2web.com and myhosting.com blogs. If you are looking for details about how to subscribe by RSS I recommend you checkout Tim’s post here.

I hope you enjoy the new blogs.

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

With our launch of Exchange 2007 come a few changes relating to SPAM filtering. Unfortunately, Microsoft launched Exchange 2007 with changes to the way that Exchange accounts are activated and the way that rules are created. As a result we’re no longer able to automatically insert our adjustable SPAM Filtering rule for Business Exchange 2007 users. However, we’re expecting that some of the changes and updates with Exchange 2007 SP1 will allow us to reintroduce this feature.
 
But just because we can’t automatically insert the rule for you, doesn’t mean we aren’t doing anything. All incoming email is still scored against our Anti-Spam system, and assigned a SPAM score from 0 to 10. The score that the email receives is inserted in the header of the email, and you can create a rule in Outlook or in any Email Client to take advantage of this. For example, you can create a rule which filters email with a score of 5 or higher by searching for the following header text:

X-Spam-Level: *****

Then move those emails to your SPAM or Junk Mail folder. Notice the 5 asterisks, which correspond to a score of 5 or higher. If you find that the rule is filtering too much non-SPAM, you can reduce the number of asterisks in the rule. If you find it isn’t filtering enough SPAM, you can increase the number of asterisks.
 
Further, both Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 include Junk Mail filtering options. In Outlook 2007 these options are available from the Tools menu by selecting Options, choosing the Preferences tab and clicking on the Junk E-mail button. As you’ll see, you have the option to choose 1 of 4 levels of junk email protection (either No Filtering, Low, High, or Safe Lists Only). You have the option of deleting suspected junk mail automatically, disabling links as well as adding warnings and postmarks. You can also create a Safe Senders list, a Safe Recipients List and a Block Senders list. You can even filter email based on the language it is encoded in, or the type of domain name it is sent from.

Using either or both of these options should help you keep your Inbox relatively free from SPAM. And we’ll continue to do our best to help keep you SPAM-free!

Thanks,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

We recently announced the launch of Exchange 2007 that has led to some question about our email road map. So I want to lay things out for everyone.

• Currently all NEW customers signing up for Business Exchange Hosting will have their account provisioned on Exchange 2007.
• For existing Business Exchange Hosting customer, we are finalizing a migration strategy. We want to ensure that the transition to Exchange 2007 is completed with limited down time and with as little inconvenience to our customer as possible. We will be contacting customers directly with more details shortly.
• For customers with Personal Exchange and mail2web.com LIVE accounts the move to Exchange 2007 will take a little longer. Microsoft’s licensing model for Exchange 2007 including the ActiveSync component is different than the one for Exchange 2003. Additionally, HMC 4.0, Microsoft’s provisioning platform for Hosted Exchange 2007  has some technical limitations when it comes to our Personal and mail2web.com LIVE products. We are working our way through these administrative and technical details. Currently we are exploring the possibility for extending our offering of these products with Exchange 2007. In the meantime, we will continue to provide and support both under Exchange 2003.

I hope this answers some of the questions that are out there about our email solutions and Exchange 2007.
 

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

Today we have launched Exchange 2007 for all new Business Exchange Email customers.

Exchange 2007 is the latest version of Microsoft Exchange, the industry’s leading solution for e-mail, calendaring, and unified messaging. mail2web.com Business Exchange provides built-in protection to help keep your e-mail system up and running and insulated from outside threats while allowing employees to work virtually anywhere, using clients such as Microsoft Office Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Web Access, and mobile devices.

One of the biggest improvements with the release of Exchange 2007 is the web interface. Outlook Web Access, (OWA) provides a rich, Outlook like experience in a browser.

New features in Outlook Web Access 2007 enable users to:

• Schedule Out of Office messages and send to internal and/or external recipients
• Use the Scheduling Assistant to efficiently book meetings
• Use WebReady Document Viewing to read attachments in HTML even if the application that created the document is not installed locally
• Access RSS subscriptions
• Search the Global Address List

Our Hosted Exchange model provides customers with competitive and predictable pricing as well as the security and features of more expensive in house email solutions. We offer even more flexibility with no minimum up front commitments, single seat pricing plans and 30 day free trial. This platform and model will allow us to remain as the leading email solution provider for Small and Medium Businesses word wide.

Existing Exchange 2003 customers with Business Professional Accounts will still be able to add and manage users on the 2003 platform. A migration plan is being finalized for business plan customers to move to Exchange 2007. More details will be announced shortly.

For more details about mail2web.com Business Exchange 2007 plans click here.

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

About a week-and-a-half ago, we launched a new feature in both of our Control Panels.  Some customers may have already noticed and started taking advantage of this feature. This new feature allows you to view all of your past and current Customer Support cases. This includes all email correspondence, chat correspondence, and even telephone correspondence with our Customer Support department.

What is the advantage to you as a customer?

• You’ll always have access to all the Customer Support history linked with your account.  If you’ve forgotten what the solution to a given problem, go back at any time and have a look.
• If you’re away from your email but still want to check the status of a Support case, now you can.
• If for some reason you didn’t receive our reply email, you can view everything and even reply from your Control Panel.

We hope that you’ll find this feature useful, and if you haven’t already… try it out now!

• mail2web.com Control Panel
• myhosting.com Control Panel

Thanks,

Tim Attwood
Product Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

We have made some changes to our Affiliate Program. Effective immediately the pay outs have been increased to 4 times the monthly fee for the plan. This is a great time to join the program or if you are already an affiliate to make even more money.

Here are the basics of the program:

• The program is free to join.
• We provide you with an online tools to manage your account and access the resources you need.
• Payouts are based on the schedule below. As a rough guideline they are approximately equal to four months fees for the service.
• After a referred customer signs up they must stay with that service for a minimum of 90 days and their account must be in good standing.
• Payments options are by check, PayPal or Account credit (for existing customers).
• The minimum payout will be $100.00 US.
• Payments are made once a month for qualified sales.

For all the details you can check out our website: http://softcom.biz/Affiliates/

Sign up for our Affiliate Program and start making money now!

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
V.P. Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

**Exchange payout is per domain with at least one active professional seat

 Just a reminder that Daylight Saving Time in North America is coming to end one week later starting in 2007.

For more information you can read my blog post from last spring here.

Thanks,

Stephen Nichols
Marketing Manager
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.

We get a lot of email from visitors to our site. It’s a mixture of questions, feedback, SPAM and sometimes the absurd. It’s Friday so I thought I’d share with you one that I found particularly entertaining:

Customer writes:

“How does mail2web actually make money?  I have a colleague who believes you make your money by harvesting passwords and then robbing people blind”

Maybe I’m ignorant but I’m not sure how to ‘rob people blind’ with just an email address and password. Can I walk into a bank, give them a email address and password and start making withdrawals?

I recognize that there are sites that harvest user names and password for online banking,  paypal,  ect. and somehow manage to exploit these accounts - though I’m not exactly sure how. I do know that ‘phishing‘ sites like this operate for a very short time and then, as people start to complain, they quickly disappear.

We’ve been operating our email retrieval application for 10 years under the same domain. We do not harvest user names or passwords – we don’t even keep them. If you’re interested in what we do with personal information here’s a link to our privacy policy .

So if we are not ’robbing people blind’, how do we make money? That’s a fair question. mail2web.com is expensive to run and requires a large farm of servers to service the millions of people who use the service monthly.

We subsidize some of this cost with advertisements. I know they are annoying but necessary to help pay for the free service. Otherwise we hope that by running this reliable, secure and useful service you consider subscribing to some of our  paid services.

John Carthy
V.P. of Sales and Marketing
SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc.