SmarterMail allows users to find and utilize a plethora of built-in features to improve productivity. Also, this software was developed with the goal of a more stable environment and increased performance of the mail server. These enhancements allow system administrators to easily mange the mail server.

The new features found in SmarterMail 7.x Mail Server include:

• A synchronization center
• File storage
• Better searching
• New webmail interface
• Linking tasks
• Follow-up flagging
• Mailbox migration
• Enhanced contacts

The synchronization center helps users with other applications and software that can be synchronized with the mail server. Upon access, users will be able to view different protocols and a list of the current connections. Another new feature is file storage. Files that are too large to be transferred via email will be uploaded to the server and shared through a public link.

Improve searching of messages, appointments, contacts, tasks and notes is another addition. A new indexing engine allows for faster, more accurate searches. The new interface is aesthetically pleasing and reduces the number of clicks to get to certain areas of the software. Several UI enhancements and less JavaScript make for quicker page-loading times.

SmarterMail 7.x also has a feature that links messages to tasks. Each task displays start and due dates on the calendar and are available in the special tasks screen. Follow-up flagging is important in all email programs. Emails with a red follow-up flag can easily be accessed from the special-view follow up selection.

Another helpful feature is mailbox migration. This allows new users to import contacts, emails, tasks and calendars from another email provider. This tool makes it easy to transfer these features. Finally an enhanced contact view givers users the most recent messages, attachments and appoints for each contact.

SmarterMail 7.x is a fairly innovative piece of software. It takes the normal email functions found in an application version, enhances them and adds them to the web. This software has many advantages with numerous features and will be a great addition to any business. With constant upgrades and patches, the software will improve productivity and further help businesses.

Related posts:

• November 2, 2009 – Do You Need Cloud Hosting?
• August 6, 2009 – Seven Basic Ingredients of Unix Hosting
• July 30, 2009 – The Benefits of Email Hosting
• May 25, 2009 – Web Hosting Features – A Necessary Foundation
• April 6, 2009 – Introduction to Webmin

What is Cloud Hosting?

Also known as clustered hosting, cloud hosting is a solution that often uses virtualization technology to facilitate load balancing, security and system resources over multiple servers.  This basically means that instead of relying a single piece of hardware, your website and applications can benefit from the resources of multiple servers.   In the typical shared hosting environment, a website is limited to the bandwidth, disk space, RAM, processing power and others resources allocated to the physical machine.  Cloud hosting is a concept that frees you of these limitations, providing you with on-demand access to an infrastructure that is virtually inexhaustible.  The mere structure of the cloud makes it easy to scale up or down based on your individual requirements.

Who Needs Cloud Hosting?

Throughout the years, a countless number of websites have been the victims of their own success.  This is the website then ends up suffering because of its sudden boost in popularity and traffic.  The environment in which this situation occurs the most is shared web hosting.  Once your website exceeds the limitations of a single physical server, it is susceptible to choking.   Cloud hosting is the perfect alternative as it gives you access to a cluster of servers, allowing your website to benefit from additional bandwidth, RAM, processing power and other resources it might require.  The major selling point to this solution as that you can obtain this extra boost in computing power when you need it.  If the popularity of your website subsides a bit, you can easily place the resources back into the cloud and make them available to other users.

Are There Other Benefits?

Cloud hosting services offer benefits from numerous angles.  The most obvious advantages are its scalability and cost efficiency.  Being that cloud computing is a highly scalable technology, websites and applications can be expanded greatly thanks to the additional resources.  Dealing with slow responses and frequent crashes just because your site experienced a sudden surge in traffic is a common thing in the shared hosting environment.  The cloud’s scalability allows you to avoid this problem with ease.  Another major benefit of cloud hosting is the flexible pay-per-usage model.  When signing up with a provider, you are only charged for the amount of computing power you use, similar to how you pay for your gas and electrical bill.   No longer do you have to lease and maintain a costly and complex dedicated server just to improve performance.   These are a few of many benefits that have made the cloud the talk of the IT world.

Related posts:

• January 4, 2010 – Top Reasons to Use Clustered Hosting Services
• October 2, 2011 – How Much RAM / Bandwidth / Disk Space Do I Really Need?
• December 22, 2008 – Shared Hosting: The Ideal Small Business Solution
• August 31, 2011 – Top 5 Cloud Storage Service Providers
• January 13, 2011 – Web Hosting Guide
• March 2, 2010 – Virtual Web Hosting – What is it and Who Needs it?
• March 1, 2010 – Web Hosting Plans: Disk Space and Bandwidth – Are They Really Unlimited ?
• June 9, 2009 – Finding the Perfect Balance of Disk Space and Bandwidth
• May 20, 2009 – Factors to Consider for E-commerce Hosting
• May 19, 2009 – Avoiding the Pitfalls of Unlimited Domains

1. POP3 Email Accounts – An example of a POP3 email account would be “yourname@yoursite.com“.  Most hosting companies will provide you with a large number of email accounts to use for yourself or distribute to your employees.

2. Webmail and SMTP – As soon as your website goes live, email will likely become your main source of communication.  The tool you need to make this an easy process is a webmail program such as Horde or Squirrelmail.  This process can be even faster when downloading your messages to email clients such as Microsoft Outlook or Eudora.  However, in order for this to work, you need a Unix hosting solution that supports messaging protocols such as IMAP and SMTP.

3. Spam Filter – It doesn’t matter who you are, no email user is immune to spam messages.  In this day and age of the internet, having a reliable spam filter is a must.  These applications are installed on the web server where your site resides and typically offer features such as blacklisting, whitelisting and greylisting to mitigate spam.  The more flexible filters will allow you to make configurations to tag spam and have it delivered straight to a quarantine folder to keep it from cluttering your inbox.

4. FTP Accounts – FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is a method that allows you to upload your files and maintain them on the server.  A Unix host that supports this protocol usually provides the ability to create a certain number of FTP sub-accounts.  This allows you to provide your clients and users with access to password-protected directories, which is very useful for sharing files in a more efficient and secure manner.

5. Backup Utility – While most web hosts perform automated backups on a regular basis, you should never put the fate of your website in their hands.  There are many ways to backup your website data, but the easiest way is with a utility specifically designed for this task.  Most of today’s control panels come included with built-in utilities that allow you to easily backup your site in minutes.

6. Web Stats – Analyzing your visitors and traffic can play a crucial role in the success of your site.  Popular web stat software such as AwStats and Webalizer run on the back-end of the server and can provide you with detailed reports on your statistics.  This can give you the knowledge to make the needed adjustments or additions that increase traffic and boost sales.

7. PHP and MySQL – Similar to Linux, almost all Unix plans come with support for PHP server-side programming and the MySQL database server.  These features are generally provided for no extra costs and can give you the power to create a dynamic, data-driven website.

Related posts:

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• January 3, 2012 – Battle of the Giants: Linux and Windows Compared
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There are many benefits to outsourcing your messaging needs to a professional hosting company.  This article will go over some of the most significant.

Secure Webmail Access

Email hosting providers generally equip their mail servers with industry standard 128-bit encryption, which is active during the entire webmail session.  This essentially means that any data sent to and from the server is encrypted from the moment you sign in, until the moment you sign out.  With this proven security protocol, you can ensure that your sensitive messages will not be intercepted or compromised in any way.

Secure IMAP and POP Access

Businesses are increasingly opting for email hosting solutions because they enable secure access to desktop email clients through IMAP or POP.  All email traffic is encrypted, including user names and passwords sent from the email client to the mail server for authentication.  The best hosting providers support all the popular mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird and Apple Mail.  Some even offer support for Linux and BSD clients as well as PDAs and pocket PCs.  Whether you prefer to manage your mail on or offline, an email hosting plan can ensure that is done in an efficient and secure manner.

Adequate Storage Space

When signing up a for an email hosting account, you typically get a robust amount of storage for each mailbox created.  Some give you MB of storage, others give you GB per mailbox.  All tend to provide you with more than enough to efficiently store tens of thousands of messages.  A more flexible solution will allow you to easily upgrade as your storage needs increase.

Spam and Virus Filtering

A quality email hosting solution blocks potentially harmful mail before it even enters the network.  Anti-virus scanners are usually integrated into the host’s SMTP gateways while spam is dealt with in numerous ways.  A company that truly wants to help keep spam out your life will employ filtering methods such as blacklisting, whitelisting and greylisting, and allow you to make configurations that automatically sends it to a quarantine folder instead of your inbox.

Shared Address Book

The Address Book is a very useful feature in many email clients as it provides the user with a convenient way to store contact data for easy retrieval and use.  Most email hosts offer both a private and shared address book, along with access to public network directory services.  In many cases, the shared address book can be used with any mail client that supports LDAP directory services.

Email is such a prevalent method of communication that it can easily get out of hand over time. If you are no longer able to control your messaging infrastructure from within, it might be time to consider email hosting.

Related posts:

• August 6, 2009 – Seven Basic Ingredients of Unix Hosting
• September 23, 2011 – A Look at Various Anti-Spam Packages
• September 4, 2011 – Spam Assassin – Your Savior From Spam
• June 29, 2011 – How to Conduct a Background Check for Web Hosting Providers
• April 13, 2011 – Using Captcha Scripts to Prevent Spam
• March 2, 2011 – The Release of the February 2011 Email Security Report
• January 13, 2011 – Why Reliable Web Hosting?
• November 15, 2010 – The Basics of SMTP
• October 16, 2010 – The Release of SmarterMail 7.x Mail Server
• October 4, 2010 – The Disadvantages Associated With POP3 Email

Email Tools

Email is the preferred method of communication for millions of individuals and businesses across the world.  Realizing this, web hosting companies provide all the email features needed to keep base with contacts.  Aside from multiple accounts, you generally get complimentary features such as webmail, autoresponders and forwarders to communicate effectively no matter where you might be.  Because unsolicited mail and virus infected attachments are a tremendous problem, hosting providers help you stay protected with spam filtering applications to dramatically cut down on those potentially dangerous messages.  Often overshadowed by more luxurious offerings, but email remains to be one of the most useful features in any hosting plan.

Shopping Cart Software

E-commerce is a driving force on the web and shopping carts are a big part of what enables this thriving industry.  If you have aspirations of selling your own products or services online, this is the type of software you need to make it happen. Shopping carts often come included in business or e-commerce hosting packages, usually at no additional costs.  In many cases, these programs can be easily installed through your control panel interface.

Programming Languages

Scripting or programming languages, have become common on the web hosting market but these features are geared towards more advanced users.  Some examples are open-source languages such as PHP, Perl and Ruby on Rails and proprietary technologies such as ASP and ASP.NET.  These programming tools serve benefit to developers and webmasters who are proficient at coding and building content from scratch.  A hosting provider that has these software packages installed on their server allow you to diversify your website with dynamic content that stand outs from static HTML pages.

Site Builders

Almost all web hosting plans come equipped with utilities that provide you the ability to create your site.  With most tools, you can choose from a nice selection of pre-designed templates and basically create your website in easy drag-and-drop fashion.  These utilities typically do not call for you to have any knowledge in client-side programming languages such as HTML or even server-side variations like Python or PHP.  In addition to integrated building tools, many host also offer support for standalone web design applications such as Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage. These programs allow you to create your site offline and upload it to the server without the use of an FTP client.

Conclusion

The list of web hosting features is huge and seems to expand every year.  Others you might find interesting include support for multimedia applications, web stat applications and databases among others.  To each its own in this regard because everyone has that dynamic tool set they just can’t do without.

Related posts:

• July 9, 2009 – Introducing the nopCommerce Shopping Cart
• June 24, 2011 – Preventing e-Commerce Shopping Cart Abandonment
• January 16, 2011 – Web Hosting for Small Companies
• January 13, 2011 – Web Hosting Features
• March 25, 2010 – Setting Up an eCommerce Website With Ease
• January 14, 2010 – Three Steps to Choose an Ecommerce Hosting Plan
• December 22, 2009 – How to Choose Your E-commerce Software
• December 11, 2009 – Are You Paying Too Much for Web Hosting?
• November 18, 2009 – How Complete is Your E-commerce Solution?
• October 21, 2009 – Four Hot E-commerce Tips that Payoff