As a Microsoft Small Business Specialist, installing and supporting Microsoft Small Business Server is a good choice for your clients with 5 or more users. It certainly makes a lot more sense than having all those pesky POP boxes on some random consumer ISP! However, what if there were a hosting service product designed from the ground up to work in co-operation with Microsoft Exchange, rather than attempting to provide a low-cost and poor alternative to it? Enter MessageFlow from Room101 Ltd.

It is best practice in the internet industry for a domain name to be setup with two MX record servers for relaying email. This is because when one is heavily conjested or down, the other will accept the mail instead. Most clients with a basic SBS setup will simply have a single MX record pointing directly at their ADSL line, on which Microsoft Exchange is listening to the whole world. With Room101’s “MessageFlow” service, email is first routed through one of our twoTowers, thus providing a much more resilient network topology, and also ensuring that even hours of ADSL downtime will not result in emails to your client bouncing back to the sender. (In these times of uncertainty, receiving an “Unrouteable address” bounce back for any company can cast a shadow over the company’s reputation.

There are many good spam filtering solutions which work on Exchange Servers, so why did we build a spam filtering component into MessageFlow which works on hosted servers? Well, now that spam is about 99.9% of all emails, it can severely reduce ADSL speed if each of these emails has to come into your client’s office before being rejected. Having Exchange- based filtering is important, because it can keep a junk folder on your users’systems which they can examine. But let’s save that for the emails which might be genuine, and let MessageFlow remove the stuff which is OBVIOUSLY spam, such as made up usernames (eg webmaster@yourclient.com) Basically, we cut down about 85% of spam; the remaining 15% is filtered locally.

When it comes to spam, MessageFlow uses three methods of filtering. Firstly, our mail servers are linked 24 hours a day to some of the industry’s leading Realtime Blackhole Lists (RBLs). This type of filtering (by-reputation) is very effective, and currently our servers intercept about 3.5 million spams per month using this method. There is an opt-out which clients can use temporarily if a key contact of theirs is sending from the network of a currently blacklisted ISP. Secondly, we run the incoming emails against an up-to-date list of valid users. This beats all those “guessed email address” spammers (and there are a lot of them!)

Finally, we have a proprietory content filtering system which updates every minute with news about the content of current spamming campaigns. A typical spam mailshot these days is a billion or more recipients - unless your client is in the first 1000 or so emails spammed to, MessageFlow will recognise the content of a spam which may have made it past the other checks. It can then either wipe it, tag it or dump it in a special SpamBox webmail system for the client ’s perusal, should they wonder if a genuine email has been wrongly intercepted. (Tagging is great for testing purposes, or whilst the client is getting used to the system).

We recognise that clients and resellers hate “per user” charges, therefore, we charge instead per block of 5 domain names. Additional blocks of 5 domain names can be added to the basic service for £50+VAT.

The recommended resale price of MessageFlow is £250 +VAT per annum. There is no setup fee. However, we’ve found thusfar that most of the signups have been through ITSupport Companies, who are reselling the product to their own clients. For these, we’ve introduced a generous reseller discount of 30%, making your price £175+VAT per annum.

Microsoft Exchange server is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.