Category: Email Hosting

Email Archiving

Special Imageway Email Hosting feature

An email archive is a repository generally kept in a non-productive environment to provide secure preservation of email for compliance and operational purposes. A email archiving system automatically extracts message contents and attachments from incoming/outgoing emails and after indexing, it stores them in read-only format. This ensures that archived records are maintained in their original state.

The active approach adopted by email archiving solutions ensures that the company has a centralized and accessible copy of all its email. This provides additional protection against accidental or intentional deletion of emails by end-users. Email archiving also eliminates the need to search for personal archives on each and every local machine whenever litigation support is requested.

It must be noted that ‘backup’ and ‘archival’ storage serve two different purposes. Backups are intended to save current data against the event of failure or disaster whilst archives protect data so that it can be accessed when needed.

Email archiving is available on all our Email Hosting accounts. The email archiving feature is disabled by default. To turn it on do the following:

1) Login to the “Domain Management” section on the Email Message System for your domain.
2) Click the “Misc” button.
3) Make sure the “Disable Legal Archive” option is unchecked, and then click the “Save” button.

Once you do this, a copy of all incoming and outgoing email for your domain will be kept in a read only archive for 7 years. To access this archive click the “Legal Archive” button within the “Domain Management” interface.

If you require a custom email archive setup, please contact us.  We can set up a email archive that will keep archives for shorter or longer periods or will only archive specific email based on “To”, “From”, or “Subject”.

Email archiving requirements are different based on country, state, and type of business. Be sure to research to find what email archiving is required for your business. One such document to aid in your research is available http://www.intradyn.com/email-retention-laws/

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How to send and receive secure encrypted emails

Special Imageway Email Hosting feature

  Imageway supports multiple email encryption technologies to allow secure encrypted sending and receiving of email. To talk to our mail system to send and retrieve email you usually have two options. Option one is using our webmail. Option two is using a 3rd party email client such as Outlook, Mac Mail, or Thunderbird. If you use our webmail, your connection to our mail system is encrypted using a secure web browser connection (HTTPS) automatically. If you use a 3rd party email client, you must tell your client to use IMAP(S), POP(S), and SMTP(S), where “S” is an SSL connection. You can find instructions on your domain’s email message center web page on setting up various email clients for a secure connection.

Now that you have your computer or mobile device talking to our system using a secure encrypted connection, you can send emails to anyone on your local domain and it will be secure. For example if “bob@mydomain.com” sends email to “jill@mydomain.com”, the email will reside on the same system, so it will be secure. But what happens if you want to send to another domain, such as “gmail.com”.  This is where things get more complex. When you send email to someone on another domain that is not located on our email system, our system has to talk to another email system using SMTP. Our email system will try to make a secure encrypted connection to the other email system if the other system supports it.  If it does not, then an unsecured connection will be used. Most of the large email providers do support using a secure SMTP connection.

To ensure outgoing email to another domain is sent securely you have two options:

1)      Imageway Mail Vault – Our built in encryption system allows you to send encrypted emails by storing the outgoing email on our server, and then our email system will automatically send an email to the person receiving the email, notifying them to click a web page link to read the email.  Once they click the link they are taken to a secure (HTTPS) website where they can read and reply to the email after they have been verified. You can send secure emails using any email client by putting “[Secure]” (without quotes) into your email subject. When our system notices that in the subject it will trigger our system to use the Imageway Mail Vault for end-to-end encyrption.

2)      PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) – If your 3rd party email program supports it, you can use PGP. PGP requires you to create a key which you install in your email client. When you send email using PGP, the email program encrypts your email before it leaves your computer. For the receiver to un-encrypt your email and read it, they must have your public key which must be installed on their PGP supported email program. Due to these additional requirements, we do not suggest PGP if you want an easy and universally supported method of sending encrypted emails. We suggest using the Imageway Mail Vault above if you want a easier to use solution that is universally supported.

To see if incoming email was sent using a secure connection from another domain, you have two options:

1)      If you are using our webmail (not the Mobile Office) and you see a “pad lock” icon next to the email sender or subject, then the email system that sent the email supported the ability to talk to our system over a secure encrypted connection and your email was sent securely. The emails themselves are sent in a plain text format over the encrypted connection, so it does not mean that the Imageway Vault or PGP was used, which offers another level of security because it encrypts the actual email content itself while sending over an encrypted connection.

2)      If you are not using our webmail, then you will need to look at the full email headers for the “X-Encryption: SSL encrypted” text. You can search online to find out how to view email headers for your specific email program.  If you are using Mac Mail, you can add any email header to be shown in your email view by going to the “Viewing section” of the Mail preferences, choose the “Custom setting”, and then add the “X-Encryption: SSL encrypted” text. This is a nice feature Mac Mail supports.

Using the methods above, you can have a secure end-to-end encrypted email connection which provides additional security to your business. These advanced features are included with all our email packages.

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The Best Apple MacOS and iOS Email Hosting Around

We know Apple users are passionate about their devices as much as we are passionate about offering high quality email hosting services. Our Imageway staff members have been long time fans and users of Apple based software and hardware. Since we have always appreciated the diversity Apple brings to the computer world, we wanted to provide the best email hosting services to the Apple community of users. We feel we have achieved this over the 20+ years we have been in business by consistently improving our services to support Apple based software in every way possible. The areas where we feel we offer the best email experience to Apple users are in the following areas:

Privacy
Many companies package their services as free or low cost and then take your personal information as payment. Apple has treated privacy as a fundamental human right, and made it one of their core values. Since we respect and agree with this sentiment, Imageway has always been a company that takes your privacy seriously. Since we own and manage our own hardware computer systems, none of your data is stored on or shared with any 3rd parties. Our hardware systems run in a secured data-center, and not on any of the cloud services such as Amazon AWS or Micorsoft Azure. There are no 3rd party advertisements of any sort on our services. We do not obtain or track any data except for what is required to offer our hosting services to you. We will only release data to a 3rd party as is required by law. Our computer servers are located within the local geographic area, and not spread all across the world in various jurisdictions. Lastly, by using advanced security methods, we assure your data is hardened against illegal spying attempts. We offer SSL encryption for all of our service communication protocols to ensure secure transmission from point-to-point. We also provide the ultimate email security by offering end-to-end email encryption without the use of plug-ins (works with all devices, and all email clients).

Reliability
To provide the highest level of reliability we start out by using the same rock solid operating system core that MacOS uses, UNIX. Our systems use enterprise hardware that was built with redundancy in the areas of power supply, memory, CPU, and I/O. For our data storage we use RAID 10 and ZFS for the greatest storage reliability and perform backups of this data nightly. Our hardware systems are housed in our own data centers with redundant UPS and network connectivity. Lastly, we have multiple data centers geographically separated, with all the data storage being sync’d between them. For more information about our service reliability please click here.

Speed
On top of our UNIX OS based foundation we use the most optimized software on the market for our email services to provide optimal speed. Read access to the stored data uses a combination of RAM, SSD, and HDD tiers. The filesystem RAM storage is very efficient due to using ZFS ARC caching. The ARC functions by storing the most recently used (MRU), and most frequently used (MFU) data within RAM for the quickest access possible. When the RAM cache becomes full it goes to the SSD, and then eventually to the HHD. This combination of highly optimized software and I/O access provides the highest speed possible when it comes to accessing email that is stored on our servers.

Security
All of our supported email protocols support SSL/TLS to provide encrypted communication channels between clients and servers. For example, if you send an email to Gmail, our system will create an encrypted IMAPS/POP3S connection to your email client, and then the email will be sent using SMTPS between our mail server and the Gmail server. Additionally we provide free SSL certificates to all our customer email domains we host.

For login security we support two factor authentication (2FA). This requires you to use either “Google Authenticator” or “Authy” on your iOS mobile device to generate the code required for login. Additionally, we support 2FA for IMAP, POP, and SMTP that works with any email client. If you find it a hassle to manage the 2FA code entry using the email client, you can also create application passwords which can be used for specific applications. For more information about 2FA support please click here.

Instances where you require the highest level email security, we provide end to end encrypted email support that works in any email client without the need of plugins. For more information about our end to end email encryption solution please click here.

Client Support
We have gone to great lengths to support the main methods used for communication by the included clients in MacOS and iOS (Mac Mail, iCal, and Contacts). When it comes to email synchronization support in Mac Mail for MacOS and iOS, we support IMAP(S), POP3(S), and SMTP(S). Calendar synchronization with our systems uses CalDAV(S). Lastly, contact synchronization with our systems uses CardDAV(S). Since iOS doesn’t support IMAP IDLE to provide push based email, if you require push based email then we provide ActiveSync(S) support which will also sync calendar and contact data. The “(S)” designates the availability of the encrypted version of that protocol.

If you don’t like the Mac Mail, iCal, and Contact applications included with MacOS then we can offer an alternative solution. We have partnered with the company that we feel provides the best email client for MacOS called eM Client. Our customers are entitled to receive a free 1-year subscription license of eM Client when signing up for any of our email hosting packages. Additionally, Imageway will provide direct support for eM Client Users using our email hosting services to ensure the most optimal experience possible. For more information about eM Client as an alternative email client please click here.

Lastly, we value legacy support for software and devices that use our email hosting. Just because your device is old shouldn’t mean your the services for that device have to stop working for it. We have supported email protocols that date back to 1982, and plan on supporting these methods of client communication into the future. Some companies will depreciate client communication methods that make your device obsolete on any given day. Rest assured, here at Imageway we want to make sure our services continue to work on your devices, regardless of how old they become. For more information about our legacy device support please click here.

Junk Mail (Spam) prevention
We utilize all the best spam prevention methods to provide the most spam free experience possible. This is accomplished by using SPF, SURBL, RBL, DKIM/DomainKeys, Virus Scanning, and ASpam content based message scoring mechanism. When an email is recognized as SPAM, it goes into your SPAM folder which is accessible via IMAP in your email client. If you get junk email in your INBOX, then you just move it to the SPAM folder, and this will add the email sender to your block list and train the system. If you get legitimate email in your SPAM folder, then move it to your INBOX and this will add the email sender to your friends list and train the system.

Customer Support
When you contact our support you will be in touch with a high level tech support agent that is based locally. You will not have to go through multiple levels of support to get someone with a high level of technical knowledge to get your email hosting working. We provide phone and chat support during normal business hours, and 24/7 email support. We manage our own remote access system that allows our support staff to remotely pull up your MacOS or iOS device to help us provide the best support possible by actually visually seeing and interacting with your device.

Cost
We have tried to provide the lowest prices possible for the quality of services we provide. Instead of charging on a per email account basis like most high end email hosting services, we use a shared storage concept. You can create as many email accounts as you want, and they all share the same domain storage allotment. You can limit the storage usage on a per email account basis, and you can always purchase more storage if the total allocation for the whole domain is used. Since storage is the most costly thing for us to maintain and replicate, we found this as a better basis for our pricing.

Conclusion
You can see from all the above areas, we have went above and beyond just about any other hosting company has done to provide the ultimate email hosting experience for Apple users. Our email hosting services work with your own custom domains (me@mydomain.com) and allows you to create as many email accounts you want to use the included shared storage. This goes beyond what Apple offers with their Custom Domain iCloud Mail Hosting, which is limited to five custom domains, with up to three personalized email addresses per domain. If you would like to learn more about the unique hosting features we offer, we invite you to check out the “FEATURES” header option at the top of our website to see our unique email specific features, or visit our our email hosting page.

We welcome you to become part of our family and experience our high quality email hosting services for yourself. If your new to email hosting, we can help you through the process of getting your own custom domain setup for your business or yourself. If you have an existing email solution in place and would like to move to us, we can help migrate all your existing email over to our systems without any downtime.

If you would like full information about our email hosting please click here. If you have additional questions or comments please contact us at one of the means available at: https://www.imageway.com/contact-us

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New Gmail and Exchange Online Login Authentication Restrictions Starting in 2022

Important changes are coming in 2022 to both Google Gmail and Microsoft Exchange Online (Office365) that can break the use of your current device applications that access either of these email services. Starting on May 30, 2022, your Google Account will no longer support the use of less secure third-party apps or devices which sign in each time using only your username and password. Following closely behind, your Microsoft Account will start to no longer support what they call basic authentication on October 1, 2022.

In both instances this means that you will no longer be able to login in to your Google Gmail Account or Microsoft Exchange Online account using proxy authentication which uses your username and password that is stored on your device for each communication request. Attempting to do so will most likely result in an error such as “NO [AUTHENTICATIONFAILED] Invalid credentials (Failure)”, “[AUTH] Username and password not accepted”, or “HTTP 401 error: bad username or password” being reported by your application when connecting to Gmail or Exchange Online.

These changes by both email providers are going to break the ability of email clients, software products, and devices (such as digital senders) that rely on those email protocols (IMAP/POP/SMTP/EAS) to no longer function unless they are upgraded to use OAuth for authentication. OAuth is a more complicated login method that requires you to get an access token from an authorization server, which is then stored and used by the application to access your account. The usual way to obtain this access token requires you to login to a webpage, and then approve the access permissions that are required. The OAuth requirement will additionally make it difficult for software to automate mass migration of email accounts away from their services.

Here at Imageway we plan on continuing to support proxy authentication for the foreseeable future so that all your old devices will continue to work without interruption. Legacy device support is a very important service feature we offer (https://www.imageway.com/legacy-device-support). Additionally, we like the simplicity of proxy authentication and feel we can secure this method of authentication using our unique blend of encryption (TLS), two factor authentication (2FA), and other various checks during login. Of course we always recommend you don’t make your email password easily guessable, and never reuse your email password somewhere else. That alone will go a long way for securing your email account.

If you would like full information about our email hosting please click here. If you have additional questions or comments please contact us at one of the means available at: https://www.imageway.com/contact-us

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