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I will now start a review on the email server software MDaemon by Alt-N Technologies. Pretty unique name for a software developer this one. I had known for a long time about this software, during the days when I started having broadband access (was about 2001 or so). Well, then I was using the err….”trial” version of MDaemon from my home to act as my email server. I think it was under another company called Deerfield or something (Editor: Got info from Alt-N that Deerfield was actually one of the resellers, not the developer). All you need back then was a Dynamic IP client (yes, it was dynamic), unlimited internet access and you can start your own email server. And it was pretty easy to setup, install the software on a Windows system, configure a domain name to point to your IP and add users and you are well on your way to become an email administrator.

Now, my company decided to setup their own in-house email server and I made use of my previous experience with MDaemon to do it. It has been years since I had used this piece of software but I was still very impressed with it. MDaemon Pro allows you to have multiple domains (or virtual domains) and it is licensed per user. For 50 users, the pro version cost US$760. You still need to pay for anti-virus and anti-spam and that’s per user too. Again for 50 users, it is US$330 yearly. And yes, it is not cheap. Especially when you compare to some Linux email solutions. For installation, it’s the same thing, just install the actual software and the Security Plus (anti-virus and anti-spam addon) on your windows system (Win2k/WinXP/Win2003).

The first thing you would realize after you have installed the software is that it has a lot of features! I mean really a lot. I have tried other email solutions (mainly Linux ones) and these email solutions do not have so many features and options for you to configure. Well, it can be confusing at first glance, but after a while, it gets easier. Anyway, if you understand how an email server works, the administrator interface is pretty well organized. Okay, the next step is to point your MX records to your server and start to add users. If you have more than 1 domain, you can configure it as well. Actually, if you are looking for a basic system, that’s all you need to do. Just make sure the FQDN for your server is correctly setup.

But of course, this review will not stop here. We have a lot of features to go through. Some of which are very useful to email administrators. The software allow bandwidth throttling (which allows you to control which service to throttle), event timers (how long a connection have to wait before giving up), archival (which creates a copy of incoming and outgoing mails from the server for your paranoid boss), forced signature (leaves a signature at the bottom of every message like saying everything is not to be blamed on the company) and so on. You really have to use this program in order to see how powerful it can be. It even allows you to have “attachment linking“, which sort of removes any attachment and replace it with an URL for your receiver to download. This can save big on bandwidth, disk space and server resource.

If you are into micro administrating, you are also in for a treat. You can assign administrators (Global or Domain) privilege to the email users. A global email administrator can control the email server and it can be configured through a web-based interface. A domain administrator can configure only users in his/her domain. This gives you the flexibility of dividing control to different “administrators”, each only to their own domain.

If you are worried about security, you will be pleased with what this software can offer you. MDaemon allows you to do content filtering (like which file attachment to reject), DNS Blacklists (for blocking spammers), Reverse Lookups (to check whether an IP address sending the mail has a domain name registered to it), SMTP authentication, POP before SMTP, SPF, DomainKeys and comes with a powerful spam filter. This powerful spam filter can be configured to use a scoring system and a variety of spam fighting techniques like Bayesian Classification.

I have run my company’s email server for about 1 month now and I didn’t find any major problem. Although the domain name is pretty new (about 6 months), it seem to have fewer spam and viruses (in fact no virus email went through) than before. I don’t have any complains about sending and receiving mails from users either. This is surely a good sign and if all goes smoothly, maybe I can get promoted to like a Director or something cool sounding and have my own parking space.

Yes, I was impressed before, I am even more impressed now. It’s true that it is expensive but if you are keen on running your own server, but think that it is not wise to spend a lot of money hiring an experienced Linux administrator purely for administrating your email server, MDaemon running on Windows system is the best solution. It’s simple to install, simple to configure and troubleshoot. I mean, anyone with some knowledge of Windows and a little on Internet and setting up servers will not have any problem with this software. I would recommend this software to small and medium businesses. But I think if you are a big company, with a hell lot of users, using Linux email servers which probably be more worth while in the long run. Not that MDaemon cannot handle the load (I think it should be able to), but the users licensing cost will be too great (plus the yearly cost of Security Plus) and it would be better to just hire an experienced linux administrator to maintain your linux server (which software can be virtually free, that includes ClamAV as well).

I am now hoping for a Linux version of MDaemon. It would be real cool to have such features embedded in a Linux email server, making all the other Linux email administrators jealous! Surely such a email server will encourage other developers to incorporate such features in their own releases too. Let’s all keep our fingers and emails cross.

And no, Alt-N did not pay me money to do this little review. My crap blog and I, we are too unimportant. If you are learning to setup an email server, please take a look at my article on setting up of an email server.

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If you are using Linksys WRT54G v1-v4, WRT54GS v1-v4, WRT54GL v1.x, WRTSL54GS (no USB support), Buffalo WHR-G54S, WHR-HP-G54, WZR-G54, WBR2-G54 or Asus WL500G Premium (no USB support) as your router, I would like to introduce you a great firmware – Tomato. It is an solid replacement for the default firmware that comes with your router.

I guess the biggest advantage is that it is lightweight and small in size. That’s important in a consumer router because of the limited RAM inside the router. If the firmware takes less RAM, there are more resources left to do all the other work and function of the router. This little firmware also improves on the features of your router by adding the ability to increase the limits on the number of maximum connections and wireless features like WDS and wireless client modes. It also has a very user-friendly interface which even a beginner can easily configure their router.

I have been using this firmware for about 3 months now and it works great. I am using some P2P software to download, err…Linux Distros which can go up to several gigs and never once did it hang or require reboot. And I have been downloading mightily heavily for continuous periods of time. I must say, I am very impressed with the firmware. Of course, if you need more advanced features (for most users, they don’t need such features), you will have to look at other firmwares, but if you are just looking for a stable, lightweight but powerful firmware, you should really take a good look at Tomato.

If you want to learn more about Tomato’s features, try this Tomato wiki page.

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Found a very interesting site, it’s called Quick Buck Crew Site. Well, what this little crazy site does is to expose websites that simply tries to make trick or cheat their customers of their hard earned money. We are talking about scammers here, who takes your money and then run off into the night. It has a blacklist of such sites which visitors can come and check whether someone (or a site) is a cheater or scammer. They have a QBC (Quick Buck Crew) Wall of Shame thingy you can look out for.

Please note that this site is an opinion of one person, not really a true blacklist at all. And most of the information is gathered from Digitalpoint forums. Although this forum is pretty big, it is still highly opinionated and can be rather one-sided so you should be careful. This kind of forum is full of scammers too. I myself don’t always trust what the crowd in Digitalpoint forums say, and you should always do your own research too.

Anyway, if you are planning to pay for a service, it is always better to do your own research and seek out the opinion of different groups of people. You should not depend on a certain type of people, especially if that “type” tends to be “follow the wind” kind. You will never get an accurate review. And if you read Digitalpoint forums carefully, you will realize that they tend to sway one side. Just check out the directories subforum. Just too full of ass-kissers and sheeps who simply just agrees everything with the crowd. Actually, it is kind of sad to see such people in a “technical” forum.

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Before we continue on this post, please visit World of Peter first and read any one of the blog post. What do you think of it? At the time of writing, the first blog post is about Norway – Home of the Vikings. Very good read there. I must say, I am very impressed with the writing style – it’s easy to read and flows very well. And it is important to note that Peter is a first time blog writer and in that, he does a wonderful job.

Anyway, I have several of his works published in my business directory as well if you are interested. There are mainly articles on his travels around Europe and there about. I myself have never been to Europe and thus keen to read more about the countries and it’s cultures there. Europe is so damn diverse, it’s confusing to say the least! Sure, everyone knows a little about the Europe and even it’s history, but reading first hand accounts of people’s travels is more engaging and well, it gives me some “satisfaction”. Hey, who knows, one day I myself might be wandering all around Europe soaking up all the beer there. It’s just too bad it is so far away from where I am living. However me being my charming viking raider self, I wonder how long will it be before Europe on the whole decides to exile me forever? I am pretty sure the English people will not be amused by my witty humor. And once the Germans find out that I have drank all their beer, god knows what will happen to them, especially come October. Now that’s a scary thought.

If you have traveled to Europe before, perhaps you can give us a first hand account of your travels? I would like to hear about your travels, your experiences with the people and the difference in cultures and attitudes. Heck, if you have anything interesting to say, just pile it all on man.

PS: Peter is the brother of Paul le Roux, the administrator of Webwobot Search Engine, who himself has contributed several wonderful articles to our business directory. We love Paul. We also love his beer.

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I just pop by to inform you of an interview I did with Scolls (Paul le Roux) of Webwobot a while back. You can read: Interview with Paul le Roux of Webwobot. WebWobot is actually an UK Search Engine but with an international focus as well. What this means is that you can search for specifically for UK sites or on the general internet. But no, Webwobot doesn’t discriminate between UK sites or not. What only matters with WebWobot is your content. And it loves content. I mean, it doesn’t care whether you are a big business with a gazillion dollars or some lowly webmaster, if you have good quality content on your site, Webwobot will gobble it all up and then serve it nicely to you. I think that Paul believes that content is king, everything else is second place. This is exactly what I like about Webwobot. Not links or meta tags, but content. Sure, it is small now, but it is growing. I have to say, this is one good unique Search Engine to look out for in the future.

If you are a webmaster and would like to submit your site for crawling to this Search Engine, please visit this priority submit page. Or you can join their PageTrade program in which webmasters exchange “pages” instead of just doing link exchange. This way, you can add content on your site while providing a powerful link to your partner( and vice versa).

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Nope, they didn’t pay me to review their services. Neither did they threatened to cut me off if I don’t write a good review. Actually they should. This is a fair and unbiased review and it’s all my opinion. Don’t beat me up if you disagree, okay? I am just their paying customer. Our webhost is HostPC. I have been using this Webhost for about 3 to 4 months now and it’s been quite good. The only serious downtime was for about 2 hours or so. However, I did face some intermittent FTP access problem once in a while.

Speed wise, you tell me. I find the speeds quite reasonable myself (this is all the way from Singapore), although it is not like blazing fast, but I don’t think there is a need for that anyway. And nobody using the site complained about the speed. Performance wise I have no problems too. I am using 2 databases, one for my directory and one for this blog. Again, I had acceptable speeds and no lag, which I expect since both these sites have very little traffic.

Now we go to the support. I have to say, their support isn’t the greatest. In fact, I have send questions to their support staff which wasn’t even answered. I mean, at least do a simple reply for their customers. Email support seemed not to be their main priority. So you are forced to use their ticketing system, which is a bit cumbersome. But they do reply if you use this ticketing system at least. Weird that they leave emails to support addresses unanswered. This is not that good.

Overall, I think this is quite a good host. And it’s reasonably priced (aka cheap) as well. Their control panel is DirectAdmin, not Cpanel. This is probably where they saved some money and pass it on to their customers. Although DirectAdmin is not as feature rich as Cpanel, it’s still pretty powerful and user-friendly. I would highly recommend this host if you are looking for a budget plan.

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Today I will be introducing you TreeWalk DNS. What is that you say? TreeWalk DNS is actually a DNS caching software for your PC. You know, when you type in an URL into your browser, it sort of changes to a few numbers called IP address in order for you to get to the site. Something is needed to “resolve” that URL or domain into IP address. These are called DNS Servers which stores part of these information. Part only? Yes, not complete. So if your DNS Server doesn’t have that address, it will “refer” to another that it thinks will have. But if that DNS server doesn’t have it too, it will refer to another and so on.

Okay, so what does this DNS Caching software does? It acts as an DNS Server by storing these addresses for you. So once it knows the address, it will no longer need to ask your ISP’s DNS Servers anymore (for a certain amount of time). Thus improving the speed of your surfing. Furthermore, Treewalk DNS can be “tweaked” to act as an authoritative DNS Server as well! This means that it can store addresses which other DNS servers can request information from. Yes, this is a pretty nice software and did I mention it is available for free?

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If any of you need to contact me, or just to post any question on authority sites, search engines, directories and the internet in general, you can post in the Search Engine Forums down at WebWobot. I am pretty active there and usually visits there once per day or so. Anyway, it is a very good forum as well.

The forum administrator is Scolls, I am sure that you will find him quite an interesting and unique person to talk to. See all you guys there!

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Maybe not. But hey, let’s not count it out yet.

Check out this little intro.  Take a look.

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Hi all, it’s me again.

I am here to tell me about an interesting concept about “link exchange”. Well, instead of exchanging just links, how about exchanging pages?

I mean, we all know that reciprocal linking isn’t that effective, but those links are just links. But trading pages could work better, because first of all, it’s not link exchange. It’s like content exchange. And you can get all sorts of keywords and keyphrase in that page as well.

So how about trying about WebWobot’s PageTrade ? I am a member too.

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