Improving Disk I/O and Overall Performance for Your Mail Server, Part 2

May 23, 2013 by 1 Comment

In Part One of our series on Improving Disk I/O for Your Mail Server, we discussed some tweaks to your operating system and any other server software, such as anti-virus, to increase overall performance. In this post, we’ll look at settings and tweaks to SmarterMail itself. If you’re doing some of these already, then you’re ahead of the curve. However, read through and see if you can grab one or two more that allow you to squeeze the most out of your mail server performance.

SmarterMail Tweaks

Setup Domain Auto-Clean Rules for Junk Mail and Deleted Items

When SmarterMail is set up it can be configured to move any spam mail to a Junk Mail folder and any deleted items can be moved to a Deleted Items folder. This is an easy and convenient way to manage these types of emails, but users can get a little distracted and leave these folders unattended. This means that the folders can grow in size and grow so large that they take up an inordinate amount of disk space. To remedy that, administrators should set up rules to automatically clean these folders after a certain amount of time, such as weekly or monthly. Setting up these rules is a great way to ensure that these folders don’t grow out of control, take up a ton of disk space and eventually bog down your disk i/o.

Limit File Attachment Sizes – Use File Storage Instead

It’s hard to get around users sending and receiving files via email. However, you can limit the size of the attachments that can be sent and then offer SmarterMail’s File Storage as an alternative for large attachments. Attachments are stored within a mail server’s GRP file, and encoded. This encoding can add anywhere from 30% – 50% to the size of the attachment. For larger files, this means that disk space can be greatly affected when limitations are absent. File Storage, on the other hand, stores the uploaded file in a user’s folder, but the file isn’t encoded, so it doesn’t increase in size. In addition, users can better-manage file storage files right from within the SmarterMail webmail interface, thereby keeping disk space utilization to a minimum.

Create Strict Spam Settings

A very simple way to keep your mail server running smoothly is to limit the amount of email that actually comes into the mail server. A perfect example is spam messages: it’s a good idea to set up and manage strict anti-spam settings to prevent messages from even making it to the server. We have a KB article of Recommended Spam Settings that you can follow, and one of our power users and a forum Product Expert, Bruce Barnes, has an extensive PDF document outlining different spam settings and efficiencies with setting up various anti-spam measures.

Consider Setting Up an Inbound Gateway

Using an inbound gateway is a great way to offload some of the spam checks and help weed out unwanted email before it gets set for local delivery. While inbound gateways only offer SMTP spam checks (things like Commtouch, etc. can’t run on an inbound gateway), utilizing extensive checks and setting up a variety of RBLs and URIBLs can greatly limit the the amount of spam that gets to the primary mail server. From there, you can use Commtouch or other third-party add-ons to further eliminate spam. You can use SmarterMail as an inbound gateway, for free, and we have a knowledge base article that can help you set it up.

There you have it, a few more tips to help maximize the performance of your mail server. In Part Three, we’ll discuss some hardware changes and email client and mobile device settings that will help keep things running smoothly, so stay tuned!

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Improving Disk I/O and Overall Performance for Your Mail Server, Part 1

May 16, 2013 by 2 Comments

While SmarterMail 11.x has a significant number of changes that greatly increase the performance and reliability of your mail server, there are still some configuration tweaks that mail admins can use to further increase performance. In this three part series (there’s a LOT to discuss) we’ll look at a few things you can do to increase the overall lperformance of your mail server beyond simply using SmarterMail. Part One will cover general server settings, Part Two will cover SmarterMail and Part Three will cover tweaks to email clients and devices as well as hardware changes to increase performance.

It doesn’t even matter if you’re running SmarterMail – any mail server will benefit from the various hardware, software and end-user/device mods mentioned. If you’re doing some of these already, then you’re ahead of the curve. However, read through and see if you can grab one or two more that allow you to squeeze the most out of your mail server performance.

Mail Server Settings

There are some changes that can be made to how your mail server is set up as well as some file system changes that can help increase performance. Below are a few ideas to get you started.

Use Robust Anti-virus

Use of good, robust antivirus software can help keep your mail server running smoothly by..well, scanning for, and removing, potential viruses that can come into your system via email. Antivirus software should be configured to scan messages as well as attachments, though care should be taken when designating where, and how often, some sections of your mail server are actively protected. See the next point, as an example. SmarterMail comes with ClamAV, an open-source anti-virus software, that can be configured when the mail server is set up, free of charge.

Limit the Resident Shield (or Similar) Component

Many anti-virus applications have a component that runs in the background that scans every single file that is copied to, saved to or even opened on the mail server. While these components allow system administrators to keep their mail servers virus-free, on heavily-used mail servers this can be a real drain on system resources. Therefore, it’s best to limit the resident shield component to only those locations that will most benefit by setting up exceptions in your anti-virus administration area.

Limit Where and What Is Scanned by A/V

In addition, you’ll only want to scan messages that come into the spool, and if possible, only scan writes and remove scans of disk reads. Disk i/o and CPU can be heavily taxed when scanning mailboxes over and over and over again. While you can run periodic checks on the server as a whole, maintaining the spool is the best way to ensure your mail server is virus-free as the only way a file can get to a mailbox is when it is written to the spool or to working/temp directories. Therefore, scanning writes only is a great way to keep your mail server virus free. Some may see this as a possible decrease in overall server security, but it will result in dramatic improvements to overall disk i/o and utilization.

Disable Pagefile

Opinions on the advantages of disabling the Windows pagefile vary: some say you should keep it “just in case” while others say that modern applications will never need it, so why keep it? Besides, most businesses run servers with more than enough RAM to compensate for any potential benefits that the pagefile represents. Therefore, you may as well disable your pagefile. The only time it’s beneficial is if you’re running a mail server with 4GB of RAM or less – and, to be honest, why would you do that?

Disable IIS Logging for the Webmail interface

Any Web hosting provider offering Windows hosting can attest to how IIS log files can grow..and grow…and grow. That’s great for customers’’ sites, but it’s not something you necessarily want to have happen to the SmarterMail Web interface. There’s enough reporting within SmarterMail for end users and administrators that seeing views, visits and hits isn’t necessary. Therefore, when you set up SmarterMail as a site in IIS (which is highly recommended in our system requirements), it’s a good idea to simply disable IIS logging for that site. Use the reports within SmarterMail versus using the IIS logs to generate reports.

A Few Other Items

There are a few other things that can be done to help optimize your mail server. These are pretty self-explanatory, so we’ll just bullet point them:

  • Disable hibernation or sleep for your server

  • Disable Windows Indexing as this reduces overall disk i/o and extends SSD life

  • Make sure write caching is enabled

  • Disable defrag for your spool, especially if you’re using a SSD

  • Defrag RAID arrays at least every couple of days, but do it off hours if possible

  • Do NOT use a realtime defragger – only use the one within Windows itself

  • Don’t defrag while backing up  your mail server

There you have it. A few tips to help maximize the performance of your mail server. In Part Two, we’ll discuss some settings for SmarterMail itself, though these tweaks can possibly be made to any mail server, so stay tuned!

Filed under SmarterMail, SmarterTools Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

SmarterMail 11.x BETA Now Available

January 24, 2013 by 1 Comment

We’re excited to announce the BETA of the next version of our popular Windows mail server: SmarterMail 11.x. Over the last few major releases we focused on providing an incredibly powerful and user friendly Web interface that users would enjoy.  With this latest release, we kept the same look and appearance but rewrote the underlying architecture with the latest Internet technologies to dramatically improve the speed, reduce the size and increase compatibility with all the latest Internet browsers and tablets.

In addition, SmarterMail 11.x brings several new features, server side optimizations and fixes that continues to make SmarterMail compatible with the latest Internet trends.  As with all releases, we worked closely with customers and partners and while we couldn’t incorporate everyone’s ideas into this release, we prioritized our users’ wants to create a new version of SmarterMail that we think you’ll really like.

So let’s take a look at what’s new…

Tremendous Performance Increases

We spent a great deal of time benchmarking SmarterMail and then making changes to increase the level of performance across the board. In many instances we’ve seen increases of 70% or more in the speed and responsiveness of the SmarterMail 11.x interface. We’ve also seen huge decreases in memory and CPU usage, even under extremely heavy loads. All of this means that the product runs much quicker and much more efficiently than previous versions. Some of the changes we’ve made include:

  • Re-factored and completely re-wrote many areas of the web interface to reduce the amount of JavaScript code, CSS and HTML, making the entire web interface much faster, much more responsive and much lighter weight.
  • CSS files have been converted to LESS, making stylesheets much smaller and more efficient.
  • The button bars were re-factored to be lighter weight controls.
  • The context menus were re-factored to be lighter weight controls.
  • The date pickers were re-factored to be lighter weight controls.
  • The tree view controls were re-factored to be lighter weight controls.
  • Greatly increased the performance of the Web interface.
  • Replaced the message editor control with a more lightweight control.
  • SmarterMail Service memory has been drastically reduced using SpamAssasin.

As we mentioned in a blog post late last year, we feel efficiency IS a product feature, and SmarterMail 11.x really proves that point.

Simple Customization of the Webmail Interface

personalizationSmarterMail 11.x introduces a much simpler way for users to customize the look and feel of their webmail experience. Now, rather than having to access system files to create custom styles, users can simply override existing SmarterMail styles with their own variables or, more simply, by modifying the overall color scheme of the primary, secondary and hyperlink colors. Users can even drastically revise the look of the webmail interface. For example, by moving the navigation icons to a horizontal position versus their default vertical position. Of course, if the Domain Admin prefers the defaults, customization at the user level can be disabled, thereby preserving branding and corporate identity.

Significant Improvements to Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync

Note-2-Calendar_smCustomers using the Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) add-on enjoy the industry standard in syncing technologies for all mobile devices and will be ready for the next version of Microsoft Outlook for Windows that’s coming in Office 2013. With SmarterMail 11.x we’ve made some significant changes in how SmarterMail integrates EAS, including better handling of the most popular devices from Samsung, the Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note II, and seamless integration with their native email clients.

Changes to how SmarterTools products work with add-ons are often only available with major upgrades due to the agreements we have with our vendors and partners. Customers who stay current with Upgrade Protection are able to take full advantage of these changes and modifications, not to mention receive full version upgrades at no additional cost. In addition, with SmarterTools, you can reinstate your Upgrade Protection at any time and still receive a discount. And unlike our competitors, SmarterTools doesn’t force customers to purchase each incremental upgrade that’s available when reinstating Upgrade Protection.

IPv6 Now Available

With the dwindling availability of IPv4 addresses, more and more hosting companies and service providers are moving towards utilizing IPv6 addresses. In addition, there will come a point where businesses of all shapes and sizes need to begin using IPv6 addresses as well. SmarterMail 11.x is here to help ease that transition. In fact, implementation of IPv6 with SmarterMail 11.x is just as simple as IPv4 – there’s no learning curve, no hassles and essentially the same functionality is available for IPv6 addresses as for legacy IPs. End users won’t even be able to tell the difference!

Greater Calendar Control

new_calendar In SmarterMail 10.x we greatly increased the functionality of our calendaring, and with SmarterMail 11.x we’re continuing that trend. In this latest version, users can not only set the default view for their calendars in the Web interface (either daily, weekly, monthly or all appointment views) but users can also automatically clean out old calendar entries. Domain or System Administrators can also default the auto-clean feature for calendars, making it an ideal solution for those admins who want to keep their mail servers manageable and running as smoothly as possible.

spell_checker

Improved Spell Checking

No one likes to send emails with spelling errors. With SmarterMail 11.x we completely revised how spell checking works, greatly increasing the accuracy and adding in grammar support. In addition, the new spell checking ignores things like URLs and email addresses and users can select an option to force spell checking before their email is actually sent, which should help with those awkward misspellings and grammar mistakes. You can also add your own words to your own dictionary to further customize and simplify your communications.

contact_pictures

Personalize Your Contacts

With the growth in popularity of social networks, people are used to see whom they’re talking to when typing up messages. SmarterMail 11.x allows users to add pictures to their contacts, thereby putting a face to a name, as it were, when typing up emails or using the included live chat. Contact pictures will even carry over to third-party live chat clients like Adium or Pidgin so users always see the person they’re communicating with, regardless of medium. In addition, ActiveSync and CardDAV will synchronize contacts with your choice of Third-party applications.

New Features for System Administrators

As if the incredible performance increases won’t make their jobs easier enough, we’ve also included several new features, tools and improvements for System Administrators. Some of these include the ability to utilize an abuse detection rule that allows blocking of IP addresses that exceed a set number of authentication failures over a variety of protocols, the ability to delete IP address that no longer exist right from the IP address bindings page and the implementation of the UIDPlus extension for IMAP. System administrators can even search log files written to the MRS\App_Data\Logs folder from within the management interface and much more.

17 Different Spell-check Dictionaries Included

In addition to the improved spell checking, SmarterMail also includes dictionaries for 17 different languages. The languages supported include:

  • English (US+UK Combined) – DEFAULT
  • English (US), (Australia), (Canada), (UK)
  • French
  • German/German (Switzerland)
  • Greek
  • Hungarian
  • Italian
  • Norwegian
  • Polish
  • Portuguese/Portuguese (Brazil)
  • Russian
  • Spanish

Greater Support for International Customers

SmarterMail is a truly international product. With customers in well over 120 different countries, support for languages other than English is a priority. In addition, as SmarterMail’s adoption across the globe continues to rise, support for non-Western character sets is also essential. With SmarterMail 11.x we’ve not only included support for right-to-left languages in our Web interface, but we’ve also gone through the entire product and greatly simplified our language strings to make things much easier for automated translations and for customers who create their own translation files.

Is that it?

Of course not! SmarterMail 11.x has many more features and improvements. You’ll find them in the release notes we’ll post in the SmarterMail 11.x BETA forum, but here are a few more that might be of interest:

  • A new content filter action was added for flagging messages and setting their priority.
  • Print preview now includes a list of attachments, perfect for regulatory compliance.
  • Users can now set start dates and end dates for their auto-responders.
  • Status messages and tip text now drops down from the top of the page and no longer disrupts page flow.
  • Language strings have been simplified so that they are much easier to translate.
  • In the webmail interface, the message grid now adds a color to the subject of unread messages to better distinguish them from messages that have already been read.
  • The ability for SmarterMail to detect missing attachments when they should be present. For example, when a message contains the word “attachment” but no files are attached or the subject is empty.

Getting started with the BETA

To get your hands on the BETA simply visit the SmarterTools BETA release forum, where you’ll see how to:

  • Sign up for the BETA
  • Get a special BETA license key
  • Download the latest BETA release (we update it regularly)
  • Communicate with other BETA testers and the SmarterTools development team
  • Stay up-to-date on the latest release note and BETA news

Sign up for the BETA

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Microsoft’s Problem(s)

April 17, 2012 by 15 Comments

Everyone knows Microsoft has lost its vision and direction in the consumer market and is years behind most industry leaders, with the Xbox as the possible exception.  But few know that Microsoft is facing the same loss of vision and direction with its server and enterprise business.

Microsoft is losing the battle of the Web

Microsoft's IIS is in red

Lets start with a little shock value: At the start of 2009, Microsoft’s IIS software was responsible for hosting about 35% of the websites on the Web. As of March 2012, Microsoft is now at approximately 13.5%. This is a 62% drop in the last 3 years and has had, and will continue to have, a significant impact on Microsoft’s future. This drop is even more dramatic when you consider the history of the Web and Microsoft IIS. As a former hosting provider myself, I remember starting my hosting business back in 1995 running Windows NT 3.51. It’s true that over the last 17 years, IIS suffered a number of issues. Today, however, it is a VERY solid and stable Web server platform. So why is Microsoft becoming as obsolete in the hosting industry as it has in the mobile phone and tablet industry? (Yes, Windows 8 shows some promise for tablets, but when it is released it will still be years behind iOS and Android in terms of availability and adoption – those are years it can’t make up). Microsoft has done a number of things to make Microsoft a viable platform and has overcome a lot of obstacles. However, in many cases each change for the better seems to precipitate a change for the worse.

Changes for better and worse

  • While Microsoft was slow to adopt open source development technologies such as PHP and Perl, they DID adopt them into the IIS/Windows realm, which is something you can’t say of the open source community with relation to Microsoft technologies like .NET.  (The MonoProject does exist but has not been well supported).
  • They introduced the Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA), which made all hosting and service providers pay monthly royalties versus one-time expenditures. SPLA itself isn’t bad but there were some pricing blunders, like one in 2009 that could have doubled the costs for hosting providers (anyone remember the authenticated/non authenticated license fiasco?), that really put the fear of God into many Microsoft hosting partners. Some proposed upcoming changes may have an even greater effect on the viability of hosting Windows products, like changing SQL Server 2012 SPLA pricing to be based on the number of processor cores a server has versus the number of physical processors.
  • They had security vulnerabilities that made it difficult to isolate many customers on one web server for shared hosting. Over the last several years they have solidified the Windows server OS through the ability to set .NET permissions on app pools and made it easier to manage multiple single app pools sites on a a single server as well as mange resources by site, thereby increasing security and performance in higher density environments.
  • They were initially slow to respond to hosting companies and the hosting model. They tried to force their own ideal of Windows hosting onto the community without listening to existing Windows hosts. For a few years, however, they actually made an effort to start a conversation with Windows hosts. Nevertheless, I get the impression from talking to partners that his conversation is, once again, turning a bit one-sided.
  • And more recently, they started competing against their hosting partners with Office Live, Azure, Office365 and more. Microsoft always had a semi-contentious relationship with hosting partners. On the one hand they did what they could to make it easier on hosting providers but, all the while, many providers knew that Microsoft was going to benefit most from whatever changes were made. Whatever positive change Microsoft made for partners was closely followed by some other announcement, like when they announced that with every Office Live sign up users received a free website and free hosting for it, that was in direct competition to what partners were offering.

Many of these obstacles still exist but what Microsoft really seems to lack is a hosting division that really wants to commit to winning the “website count” battle. At one time the hosting division at Microsoft was VERY focused on this goal and we were often told that was how funding for the division was determined. I get the impression that this is no longer the case.

Hosting as a channel to the SMB

The hosting industry is an important channel for Microsoft as it allows them to access small and medium sized businesses, web developers and designers, and a number of enterprise customers. With a continued drop off in website count there will be a transition from not only IIS-based web servers but also many other server roles that are crucial to the hosting industry. This includes things like mail servers, application servers, cloud servers, virtualization servers and more. With the drop off, the impact on revenue for Exchange Server, .NET and Visual Studio, Hyper-V and Windows Server is clear but, bigger than that, will be the lack of a channel to reach the small and medium sized businesses and the design and development community, which is huge.

And I don’t think that Microsoft can make up for this loss by transitioning their focus to services like Office365. Microsoft is having an incredibly difficult time reaching small and medium sized businesses through their online services. Many SMB’s like the ability to have choice and go to hosting companies that may be local and close to their offices (or at least in their same city), that speak their language, that offer professional services beyond just hosting a website, that offer live and accessible customer service and support, and more. These are areas that Microsoft can’t compete. By focusing on the hosting market and by focusing on their hosting partners, Microsoft was spreading their technology and not only securing and increasing revenues on the server end, but they were also protecting their phone, tablet and desktop prospects.

What happened to “developers, developers, developers“?

The developer also plays a huge role in this. Microsoft has always done a great job creating opportunity for developers to build businesses around extending Windows and its overall platform. As Microsoft dwindles in its popularity the desire to work with Visual Studio, .NET and Windows in general will also decrease. As it is, many developers want to make the shift to OSX and want to avoid having to code to multiple machines and platforms. By moving to open source technologies such as Ruby, PHP, Perl, etc. they have this flexibility.

What does this all mean for Microsoft? Well, they are losing from all angles. Although their enterprise division is reporting growth, these “website count” issues will start to impact that business over time. In addition, it will impact the development division and eventually their desktop and consumer divisions will feel the pinch. As it stands, Microsoft’s own online services are years away from replacing their hosting partners and the personal and customizable services that hosting providers offer to small and medium sized businesses.

That’s my take, anyway. What are your thoughts? What does Microsoft have to do to start regaining market share in the hosting business and avoid becoming obsolete?

Filed under SmarterMail, SmarterStats, SmarterTools, SmarterTrack, Technology Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The Lessons of ‘The Ten’: Why Google and Microsoft Want Your Email

August 8, 2011 by 10 Comments

It’s no secret that those so-called “free” email accounts from Google, Microsoft or Yahoo! aren’t really free. After all, you can’t get something for nothing. What you may not realize is how much revenue your single “free” email account can bring to the companies that offer them.

In his presentation “The Lessons of ‘The Ten’: Why Google and Microsoft Want Your Email,” SmarterTools Vice-President Jeff Hardy reiterates that the cost of providing email is inexpensive—less than $0.04 per mailbox for enterprise-level email and less than $0.39 per mailbox for Exchange-replacement level email—but the potential profits off email are exponential.

That’s because one hosting account doesn’t represent a single person; it represents an average of 10 people who can become loyal customers that pay for additional products and services. If hosting or email providers market to those 10 people, they’ll be successful.

Want to know more? Download “The Lessons of ‘The Ten’: Why Google and Microsoft Want Your Email” slideshow from HostingCon 2011.

This post was written by Tiffany D., a marketing and technical communications specialist for SmarterTools. If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to the SmarterTools Blog so you don’t miss an update.

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