Defending Exchange ??

by Bryon D Beilman

We recently engaged with a service provider to help with one of our customer who was moving from one location to another. They have a single SBS Exchange server and while their server was in transit, they wanted to appear up to the outside world, because perception to your customer is very important. While I am familiar with technology like Barracuda , Postini and others, another consulting firm I know recommended me to check out "Exchange Defender". They scan for viruses and spam and have great reporting (nice 3d looking graphs).

A few important features were advertised on their "How it works" page. Their live archive will hold messages for up to 7 days in the event of an outage, spool the messages and then send them to your server when it comes up. During that time, you can log on to their owa interface and check email that is headed your way until the server comes up. This looked perfect for our move.

Their web page claims "The beauty of ExchangeDefender LiveArchive is that it is seamless. You will not even know it's there until you need it. When you do need it, you just need a web browser. Login to your account via the secure https connection, and your email address and password give you access to the past seven days of email with the ability to respond to, delete, forward and essentially continue working while your main server or Internet connection to the office is down."

Here, however is our experience.

When the server goes down, after 3 hours, it informs the sender that "it is being delayed". When I opened a ticket and asked them about that, they said "we are just doing a courtesy notice to the sender that there was email delays and if what they were sending was time sensitive/important, and possibly choose an alternative method for delivering the message. This is done blindly after a message hasn't been delivered after 3 hours and is a global setting." . Well, that kind of makes sense, although unexpected, it makes sense.

What I didn't expect was the next step. After a day or so of being down, the messages started bouncing with:

"Microsoft Exchange has been trying to deliver this message without success and has stopped trying. Please try sending this message again, or provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator.

The following organization rejected your message: "

Is this the example of seamless mail archiving that is available for 7 days? Wow was I surprised, and so was my customer. Opening tickets with them did nothing. If you want any real response from them, you have to choose" - Pay hourly fee to get this expedited. This is how it is designed, not a problem with the customer's account.

Maybe I interpreted their service wrong. But that is not everything. When I added accounts, the last three I added did not work, so when I rolled out the service to the company , their accounts were not on there , unfortunately, it was the CXO folks. I opened tickets and they said, "it needs to propagate to our edge servers, wait 90 minutes", and after 6 hours, they realized that they had an outage, and pushed a band-aid on it.

During the server relocation, it became clear that everyone but the CEO's email was being archived to their live archive. I guess I need to back track. The email goes to their live archive servers, so you can read it, but the sender still gets a bounce, so they just bcc the message to their owa server. For us, it was true , except for the CEO, and they found their problem. They apologized, then, later the mailarchive service was down. I became very familiar with their tech support.

The final straw was when one of the users was trying to send an important email out that was being rejected by the end user. The end user's server was rejecting email from exchangedefender.com, not from us, because exchangedefender.com had been accidentally added to an open source spam list. I found a fix to that problem and all of the others; we quit using that service.

Ok, I'm done. Most times I rave about a service, this time a rant. Most of the time, we beta the service, but since their web site descriptions matched our requirements and it came with a recommendation from someone, we jumped in quickly. We jumped out quickly like a person who unknowingly jumped into arctic water.