This issue of the Concentric Newsletter has important information about many topics, including new Professional Services to help you with web site migration and other web application needs, how to combat spam and heavy email loads, more ways to protect your on-site email server and more reasons to secure your email server with PEP, GroupWare Beta updates, and the importance of back links in your SEO strategy.

Professional Services—What Can They Do For Me?

Our new Professional Services program was created to help you manage your online business or lend a hand with a specific problem. There are different types of Professional Services to meet different needs:

  • Technical Professional Services
  • Marketing and Advertising Services
  • Creative Services

Technical Professional Services: For customers with web sites hosted on our platform, or for those who need to have their site migrated to our platform, these services are designed to provide a wide variety of applications and services for all hosting platforms including platform-specific services such as UNIX and Windows. Some of the Technical Professional Services available include:

  • Web site migration
  • Account and email set-up
  • HTML code help
  • DNS and Domain Registration

Web Site Applications Services: Web Site Application Hosting services provide robust applications to address all your business needs. Services include:

Business Enterprise Services: Our Professional Services team is ready to help you address the needs of your business using new enterprise-class business services such as:

  • Perimeter Email Protection (PEP) for customers who host their own mail server and need protection from spam and viruses
  • Corporate Domain Manager migration and configuration of all of your domains
  • Advanced Email Consulting for businesses hosting their own email servers
  • GroupWare – currently in Beta, this new service lets businesses hosting on our Platform get Exchange Server-like capabilities such as shared calendar, shared address book, and more.

Marketing and Advertising Services: New services coming to you over the next several months to address the marketing and sales needs of all web hosted businesses. Coming in mid December 2006 will be the Market Builder suite of marketing and advertising services for anybody with a web site; you don’t even have to have your site hosted with us to use the program.

Creative Services: An evolving set of services to help customers with web site design and HTML editing should be available in early 2007. Like the Marketing and Advertising services, these services are offered to anybody with a web site; you don’t even have to have your site hosted with us to use the program.

Visit us at http://cts.com/professional-services/ for more information about any of these new and upcoming services. Or call us at 1-866-500-9696 for a free consultation.

Email Loads and Spam

As many of you have probably read in the media, there’s been a significant increase in the overall network spam volume over the past few weeks. Spammers have started aggressively using massive networks of hacked machines worldwide (”botnets” or “zombie machines”) which has enabled them to push more email attempts than ever before, with much less regard for their own volume, since these botnets often number in the thousands of hacked machines, distributed across just about every network provider worldwide, often using those providers’ legitimate mail relays. Here are some recent media articles documenting this spike across the world:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/06/technology/06spam.html?hp&ex=1165467600&en=a3f1a74b08d60443&ei=5094&partner=homepage

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/110806-image-spam.html?t5

http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=48196

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11420 (botnets)

This has driven our inbound mail volume up by about 40%, and right now about 90% of email attempts coming into our systems are spam and the remaining 10% legitimate email. These numbers are roughly in line with those reported elsewhere on the Internet for the past month. Our filters continue to intercept the vast majority of spam, and your individual spam volume will vary considerably based on the age of your email address, how widely it’s been available on the network, and other (often random) factors.

We’ve been expecting this for sometime since it was the logical “ultimate spam machine” (no, we didn’t give them the idea), which is why we’ve been taking steps to improve our mail infrastructure. We’ve made significant hardware upgrades and brought new servers onboard for all cluster functions, but especially inbound email. All of our new servers are 16 or 24 processor servers, giving us significant CPU capacity for new filtering functionality and other applications. We’ve also continued to tune our mail filtering databases to match the new spam techniques. No spam filter is 100% and all anti spam efforts are a constant battle to compete against new spam methods; we believe we’re getting the upper hand. I personally get 5000-6000 spam messages a day (my oldest email addresses go back 12 years and are in EVERY spam list), and our filtering does a good job of keeping my inbox sane.

We’ve also been making significant improvements to ensure that spammers can’t use our resources to hit others, including our move to turn on outbound authentication for all users, regardless of network, earlier this year. These changes lay the groundwork for more advanced anti spam features coming early next year, including some emerging mail validation technologies which are getting some traction on the industry.

Despite all this, we’ve had, over the past few weeks, some spikes in mail traffic big enough to cause some slowdowns in service handling during peak hours. We’ve also seen email slowdowns due to other providers bogging down under mail load – since email is truly a World Wide Web, much more so than the web protocol itself. When major providers start to slow down, everyone else does as well. Once our delivery to other providers starts to slow down, we spend more time queuing and reattempting messages. This “hole” was especially true on Monday, November 27th, during the morning hours, where a significantly higher filtering volume combined with after-holiday load caused some slowdowns across-the-board. We consider any slowdown in performance unacceptable and we continue to deploy new hardware and improve our software to ensure this does not recur. After Monday’s load spike we made specific changes to the way our filtering works so we can process significantly more inbound mail without bogging down the same way and without reducing the filtering in any way.

What can you do to help fight spam and the spam load?

The obvious things people have always said still holds true…be careful about leaving your email address in public (on web sites, chat-boards and the like, which are mined for spam addresses), never follow links in spam email, and never, ever click on “remove me” links. But furthermore:

  • Make sure your computers are kept up-to-date with your software vendor’s security patches, and if your operating system has a built-in firewall, make sure it’s turned on since many of the zombie machines used for spam are hacked not through mail viruses but through web-based Trojans or network attacks. Keeping your computer secure will help keep it from becoming a spam-injecting zombie. If you’re a Windows XP user, your built-in firewall settings are in the Control Panel.
  • If you’re currently using the “forward all unknown mail to master” feature, reconsider if you really need it. While this feature is useful in certain circumstances, most spammers today have large enough zombie networks under their control that they can afford to do dictionary attacks – sending email to every name they can think of at each domain – and “forward all to master” can mean that a single account gets tens or hundreds of thousands of messages a day (really!) that need to be filtered. Without this option, the vast majority of those messages will bounce before analytic filtering. You can adjust this option in the Gateway under Menu Map | Account | Controls.
  • Consider the “premium mail”’ bundle for users with large amounts of mail or excessively large spam volume The premium filter builds a customized database for each user and is more effective at dealing with certain kinds of spam because it learns not only what IS spam, but also what is NOT spam based on your individual email history. Therefore, it can do a better job of cracking the obnoxious content-free spam that’s currently plaguing the Internet.
  • If you’re using our secondary MX service and an on-site mail server, consider discontinuing secondary MX, which has been rendered largely ineffective by these same dictionary attacks, or investigate our new Perimeter Email Protection (PEP), which works like secondary but has us filter mail based on a list of your users, rather than having secondary MX pass every single address to your local mail servers. Said another way, if you have an on-site mail server, PEP does the filtering on our network before we send the mail to your server. PEP could save you from a server failure or having to upgrade your mail server capacity.
  • If you’re filtering spam to a folder, we’ll soon be releasing some new options to help reduce the amount of junk mail you need to deal with. We’ll be moving the custom setting of hold time from the premium mail feature to all users, so anyone can reduce the hold time from the default 15 days. We will also be adding a “drop junk mail” feature which simply deletes junk as it comes in rather than holding it in a folder at all.

New features coming soon…
We have some new features currently in development to further help with spam reduction, including tools to reduce address spoofing, more advanced filtering options, and features to make it easier to manage large numbers of users and their spam filters and mailboxes. Expect to see more over the next few months.

As always, we appreciate your business and welcome your feedback on this or any other topic.

David Schairer, Chief Technology Officer
Concentric, an XO Business

More Great Reasons to Secure Your Email Server with Perimeter Email Protection (PEP)

As we mentioned in our we told you about our new Perimeter Email Protection (PEP) service, which enables administrators who host their own on-site email server to implement a layer of security and protection at the perimeter. PEP blocks spam, viruses, phishing, and dictionary attacks, which means that you can significantly reduce the amount of incoming email your server processes and how much junk mail your users get daily.

PEP now comes with PEP Filtering, which lets administrators implement account-wide junk and virus filters affordably, securely, and quickly, for only $1.00/user/month. This, combined with the PEP recipient validation (we only deliver email to your server for valid email addresses that you upload), means that Concentric customers now have available a complete email security solution at a very affordable price!

Some of the PEP benefits now available to you:

  • Account-wide junk mail filtering: Filter out unwanted junk email and email viruses. Options include our Standard Junk filter or for specific power users, our Premium Junk Filter. Administrators can configure how all users’ mail is filtered and handled quickly.
  • Account-wide custom mail rules: Set up safe or block lists or specific rules that filter email based on the criteria you enter.
  • Flexibility: In addition to the account-wide Standard junk filter settings, PEP allows administrators to configure individual user-specific settings to filter email for particular users. Power users with the Premium Junk Filter option enabled can train the filter specifically for their type of incoming email; the Premium filter can be trained and used by individual users or shared across many users.

PEP Filtering is available for an affordable $1.00/user/month in your account. The Premium Filter option is available for only an additional $1.00/user/month. In both cases, your Concentric service plan must include enough user IDs for all the email addresses you upload. You can affordably add more users beyond your plan’s allocation ($1.00/user/month) or upgrade to the next available service plan.

If you’re too busy, call our Professional Services at 1.866.500.9696 to discuss our affordable, complete account set-up package.

Why Perimeter Email Protection (PEP) is better than Secondary MX

Many Concentric customers have configured our email servers as secondary Mail Exchanger (MX) records, so that if we cannot deliver email to your primary MX mail server, we spool your incoming email and try to re-deliver it for up to 5 calendar days. This helps ensure that none of your users lose any critical inbound email.

Lately, however, spammers have started aggressively exploiting secondary MX to push mail to the primaries, and since traditional secondary MX can do no user validation or other filtering, all the spam flows down to the primary.

MX Diagram

Figure A shows how secondary MX functions – if email can’t be delivered to your mail server at your premises, Concentric will spool all incoming email and attempt to redeliver it hourly to your server for up to five days.

Figure B shows how spammers suborn traditional secondary MX architectures to relay their junk mail. The secondary MX server(s) interpret this inbound email as email that cannot be delivered directly to your primary MX server, so like figure A, they try to redeliver it hourly. The result – your primary MX server thinks that Concentric’s email servers are deliberately spamming it! Some anti spam software or services then identify Concentric email servers as the spammers and blacklist them, or email administrators mistakenly block Concentric’s email server IP addresses. This causes numerous problems; those blocks will prevent the spool-and-deliver function from working for legitimate email that could not be delivered; and, should anyone using a Concentric email address send email to your company, it may be blocked.

PEP eliminates all of the above problems:

  • We only deliver email to your server for valid email addresses you have uploaded. Most spam attacks are dictionary attacks, with the vast majority of addresses being bogus addresses. Your email server does not have to process and reject all of those inbound messages with bogus addresses.
  • If your email server cannot accept incoming email or your access line goes down, Concentric still spools and delivers the messages when your server can accept mail. Your users won’t lose critical incoming messages.
  • You can further prevent spammers from targeting your email server directly by configuring it to only accept email from Concentric servers.

Note that Concentric is working on PEP enhancements for customers who prefer that their email server remain primary MX. But to address the above issues with traditional secondary MX, the only secondary MX configurations allowable must enable user validation at a minimum. PEP Filtering will also be optionally available (see the other PEP article in this newsletter for cost information) for these same secondary MX implementations. Stay tuned to the Concentric What’s New section in the Gateway for these announcements in the near future.

Why keep trying to fight spam and viruses on your own? Let us deal with the headaches around incoming spam so you can focus on your business! You’ll find more information about PEP, on the Concentric Gateway home page, select Menu Map | PEP. Or use the Contact Customer Care form to send your questions to Customer Care.

GroupWare Beta Updates: Try GroupWare during our Free Trial

If you have ever considered looking into a team collaboration, personal productivity or GroupWare application such as Microsoft® Exchange™, GroupWise™ or Lotus® Domino™; you can now get significantly similar capabilities with Concentric® GroupWare!

GroupWare is a collection of personal and team collaboration tools which are fully integrated into your account. GroupWare lets you:

  • Share personal and public Calendars
  • Schedule recurring meetings and events with your team
  • Keep Contacts private or share them with a Shared Address Book
  • Manage Notes and Tasks and keep them organized in Lists
  • Publish one or more of your Calendars to your web site so anyone can see it
  • Use Web Mail with online Calendars and Contacts or synchronize in real-time with a Microsoft Outlook® 2003 connector (coming soon)
  • Upload iCal files to your Calendar and import Contacts you may have in Outlook or Yahoo Mail® format.

If these features aren’t enough to entice you, participants in our trial will get special support, user forum access, and qualify for special promotions and free services available only to trial participants.

Don’t worry about using the premium features during this free trial period since all features are free. We’ll send you a notice 30 days before the beta trial period is over to make you aware that the free trial period is ending.

For more information or to enable GroupWare for your account during this free trial please log into your account, select the Calendar tab, read the information on the beta trial period, and select “enable GroupWare”. Please call our sales department at 866.500.9696 if you have any questions.

The Importance of Back Links in Your SEO Initiatives

I suppose I shouldn’t assume that everyone knows what a back link is, but if you don’t, and you’re managing your web site’s SEO, it’s time to get up to speed.

A back link is any other web site, blog, RSS feed, or newsgroup posting that points directly back to your web site. More than ever, especially in Google, these links are what search engines use to evaluate the importance of your site. Put simply, the way a search engine looks at it, the more people who find your site important enough to link to it, the more important your site must be. And if you’re in an ultra-competitive industry (such as web site hosting, real estate, medical, restaurant, attorney, etc.) the importance of back links grows even more.

In general, for a non-competitive industry, 70-80% of your SEO success comes from effective web site optimization. The other 20-30% of your ranking algorithm comes from back link equity. However, for highly-competitive industries, that number is flip-flopped; meaning that up to 80% of what the search engines look for is based upon your back links.

I know…astounding.

So how do I build up my back links?

Back links can be acquired in a number of ways. And all back links are not created equal. A link from somebody’s front page is more important than if it’s buried somewhere deep inside the site. A link from a site inside your industry is more important than one from a random personal web site. A one-way link is more valuable than a reciprocal link, and so on.

There are dozens of criteria for what makes a good back link, but let’s start simple. Here are some ways to start building up back links:

Directory Listings:
Submit your web site to as many directories as possible. Start with the big ones such as Google and Yahoo and then branch out to the smaller ones. Stay away from services or software that claims to automatically submit your site to hundreds of directories at once. It’s just not true.

Blogs:
Look for blogs that write about your industry and engage the writers in your business. If they like what your company does, they may write about you and point people to your web site. Not only does this create a link to your site, it’s also free marketing and promotion for you.

Start your own Blog:
More than ever, blog portals are popping up all over the place. Start your own blog and then submit it to their directories and you gain valuable links in the same manner as with traditional directory listings.

Reciprocal Linking:
Find other people who complement your business and see if they’re interested in exchanging links to each other’s site. As I mentioned, reciprocal linking doesn’t get as much algorithm boost as a one-way link, but if 10-20% of your links are reciprocal ones, you’ll get a natural boost. If you’re having trouble finding reciprocal link partners, there are companies that create networks around this very thing.

Online Press Releases:
The online press release industry has become a multi-million dollar industry. Over 20,000 press releases go out over the Internet every week. Most all of these releases will never be seen by anyone; however, they all get picked up by a number of online news aggregators, thusly creating a link back to you somewhere. You can hire an agency to write these releases for you or you can do it yourself. The formatting is rather simple (you can Google something like “online press release formatting” to find out how). Generally, sending out a press release costs $70 on average, but there are also a handful of free services that aren’t as far-reaching, but will get your stuff out there at no cost.

Online Journals and Magazines:
Take a stab at submitting an article to an online trade journal or industry magazine. Often, writers are more than happy to take what you’ve written and use it in their own articles. You can also hire a firm to do this for you or you can contact the writers themselves to see if there is interest in your business. This option is another great way to simultaneously build back links while also getting free publicity.

Text link advertising:
Here’s where it gets serious. One of the more up-and-coming industries is the text link ad industry. In short, you can select any number of web sites in the company’s network and purchase links on their site. Depending on the quality of web site you choose (you’ll want to research “PR rankings” to understand which web sites are better for this type of advertising), these links can cost anywhere from $25 to $250 per month or more. However, strategically-placed, these links can not only get you a search engine boost, they can also drive traffic to your site. This can get expensive, so choose wisely.

There is a great deal more involved with the wonderful world of back links than described here. Building a successful back link program is a time-consuming and potentially very expensive long-term project. As an additional challenge, back links are not only ranked by relevance, they are also ranked by age. This is important when considering text link advertising especially, since purchasing back links generally means you’ll need to keep them for the long haul. Search engines want to see your back links increase over time, not diminish. So if you suddenly decide to discontinue your back link purchases, you could potentially get penalized by the search engines.

Ultimately, despite the challenges, potential costs, and time-consuming nature of building back links, link-building is a critical reality if you intend to take your SEO endeavors seriously. If you’ve already optimized your site for SEO, take a few minutes to analyze how well that’s working for you. If your site is doing well in the rankings without the help of back links then it might not be important for you to build an extensive back link program. On the other hand, if your site has been lingering around the same SEO rankings for some time without getting any boost, building your back links may give you that extra edge you’ve been missing.

Last tip: want see who is currently linking to your web site? Go to Yahoo Search and type in: “link:www.yourweb site.com” to see the complete list of web sites currently linking to you, by order of Yahoo’s ranking of importance.

Good luck and good linking!

Scott Milrad, Concentric Internet Marketing Manager

® Copyright 2006 XO. All rights reserved. Concentric, Concentric logo and XO are trademarks of XO Communications, Inc. All other products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
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