The Malaysia Email Hosting Blog

Your email hosting can not work without DNS. The Mail Exchange (MX) records defined in the Zone file inside your DNS server tell where your email should go to. Usually, there are two DNS servers where one serves as backup. For those mission critical one, it is not surprised to see more than two nameservers been used.

Even wonder why your email or your friend’s email been marked as Spam? Apparently, your mail server has marked it as Spam and moved them from your Inbox to the Spam Box, or simply add the line [SPAM] in front of the subject of your email.
Of course, you can safelist/whitelist that particular email address so [...]

You are using email clients such as Outlook or Outlook Express. Your notebook is not with you, and you have some old email to retrieve from your Webmail. The default setting in Outlook Express download all messages from the incoming mail server and remove them from server. That means, it leave no copy of messages in the server. If, you have huge space and you might run into some similiar case above, check ‘Leave a copy…’. It can help!

Just one thing, keeping too many email in your email server, might slow down your Outlook Express. Everytime when you download the message from the server, it takes some little longer time to initiate.

You have something to discuss, but your team members are scattered in different locations, working on different timezone… One good thing I like about discussion through email is, a loose questions get the feedback from those who has time for a quick reply. This can in fact, save time in face-to-face meeting, yet proven to be more productive. For sure, this might not work in all cases, especially if the team members are not used to this. This is an culture to nurture.

TM, in their official press release described the act to block all 3rd party as one of the step to fight Spam. Following this, most of the companies in Malaysia who is using Streamyx broadband are affected after switching to smtp-proxy.tm.net.my. Problem including email delay and lost.

One of the latest updates I have received is, email delivered / delayed through smtp-proxy.tm.net.my is also marked as Spam by many major free email service provider including Yahoo Mail!

TM recently blocked all external SMTP except their own has forced everyone to switch and start using their SMTP. They claimed that this is one way for them to flight against Spam.

I am not sure to what extend this can help flighting Spam, but it has becoming a bottleneck now. The TM new rules block only port 25. Therefore, Spammer can still change their SMTP to different port and continue the so-called spamming activities.

But, true is - TM’s SMTP was no longer able to handle the increasing load of email delivering requests. Email delay problem occurs from 5 hours to a day.

Check your SMTP, if it points to smtp-proxy.tm.net.my, then you might want to consider printing out your email and send by Post, it could anytime faster :)

1. Make sure your mailbox space can cope with this. When come to estimating the storage space you should have at least, do include days when you don’t access your email, especially during your holidays.

2. Handling your email become a nightmare when averagely you have at least more than 100 emails a day. Email clients or webmail without Conversation view can be a setback now. Slow webmail can cause serious problem too! Keyboard shortcut of email clients can move you further with extreme increase of email loads!

3. Reducing your email. This is the hard part! Online business is about Testing. New marketing plan and features on your website, are introduced in a faster pace. Testing means you are learning everyday. Without sharing of email, this can be a problem.

Do you expect the built-in camera better than a SLR camera?

If your email is bundling with your web hosting now, then please expect just a built-in camera quality of email service!

Malaysia Email Hosting Benchmark

What happen when you try to send an email to 50 recipients? Send it one by one? Or dump all the 50 email addresses in a single email? Neither of them is a good solution. If you are sending one by one, it might take up to hours. If you do it the other way, most probably your email will be treated as spam or even block by your email hosting service provider. In this case, GroupMail could be a good help.

With the great grouping feature in GroupMail, you are allowed to categorize your email recipients into groups. Instead of sending email to a single email address, you are now allowed to send an email to groups of recipients.

Besides, you can also set a schedule using GroupMail. It is very useful if you are going to send a reminder. After the template and the schedule is ready, you can leave the rest to GroupMail.

Last but not least, you can still send the email using your own email account. You can have your email accout setup in GroupMail. However, it is strongly recommended to set an interval for the mass mailing task. You can limit it to one email in every 10 seconds or maybe 30 seconds to ensure that your email hosting provider do not yell at you for occupying their email server.

Last two months, TM announced to block the use of any external SMTP server. Subscribers of Streamyx broadband must change their SMTP address to smtp-proxy.tm.net.my. According to TM, this is to fight SPAM (I doubt this has anything to do with it…).

With all email users using TM’s STMP to deliver their email messages, something finally goes wrong!

TM’s SMTP is overloaded at last! The large amount of email going through this outgoing email server finally bring it down and all email users are having problem now especially most of their email does not deliver immediately. This nightmare starts this week. As usual, TM is not giving any notice on this issues.

Use Gmail as alternate SMTP server

I have came across many big name companies, spending hundred of thousands setting up their in-house mail server using Exchange Mail Server. Instead of outsourcing, these companies spent extra time and money to maintain their email facilities.

No doubt Exchange is great, but that is wen you know how to fine-tunning it. Most of the businesses are not able to keep themselves updated especially when come to Exchange upgrade, patching of Spams & viruses, configuring for best performance…

Just like any other business, email is one of the most important tools for your business. Let the experts (a team of people, not a single in-house IT staff) to do the job for you, and you can stay focus in your business!

Gmail charge nothing, yet providing one of the best Webmail interface by putting usability and intuitiveness into maximun, just like iPhone.

Meanwhile, business email hosting service providers offering hosted email solution for businesses at range of pricing that makes you really confuse. Outside, it is like an apple-to-apple comparison except the very huge price difference.

What is inside the Apple?

Busy mail server tends to delay email more slowly. Ideally (this happen to those fast mail server), your email once sent should reach the recipient given everything working in place. A healty mail server should not have long mail queue so that they can process your email almost immediately.

Also, if you have out-of-control of mailbox users in a single mail server, that can cause excessive loading to the mail server. The more users on Webmail, send & receiving at the same time, this can cause delay to the server.

Just one thing, the performance of the recipient mail server can be another factor of slow email. If you are sure the recipient side is running fast enough yet still receive delayed email, this is the sign that your own mail server is having some problem!

I always believe that email hosting package with unlimited mailbox is over promising, too real to be true marketing teasers. At first, it seems to be all working fine. You pay RM199 and create as many as email user you want. I came across Listed Company hosting all their 200 users with unlimited package - paying as little as 8 cent per user per month! Yes, unbelievable!

Without limiting number of users in any mail server, it goes beyong control. Too many users means an increasing email load to both incoming and outgoing mail server. You start to experience email sending delay and having intermittent downtime problems.

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Malicious virus can generate large amount of email sending out from the infected PC. If the PC is inside your corporate LAN, it can bring down the upload speed of your connection in your office. This means, you might easily get a ‘Can not connect SMTP server’ error message through your email client.

If the virus uses your SMTP to do the attack, your SMTP should have awared of this. In this case, the useful Email report come into the picture

The number of email with virus (the script trying to spread itself to more people in order to launch DoS attack at a same time) captured was relatively high.

Using the name of virus, you can do a tracing of this virus inside your corporate LAN.