Work with Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL Mail and any IMAP or POP3 Mail Offline

Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop Makes Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and AOL Mail Available Offline

Zimbra, a Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO) company a leader in open source, next-generation messaging and collaboration software, today announced the release of Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop Beta. Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop gives everyone access to a simple, centralized place to manage work, school and personal e-mail even when they are not connected to the Internet.

Through internet protocol support called Post Office Protocol (POP) and Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail and Gmail can now be accessed offline at the same time, from the same place. Additionally, Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop allows users to use the iCal standard to take their calendar offline.

"Zimbra is focused on creating communication and collaboration solutions that ease the pain points of traditional e-mail, and switching between multiple e-mail accounts is one of the communication headaches that users encounter on a daily basis," said Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra co-founder and Yahoo! vice president. "With Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop, we have taken our world-class collaboration suite and made it available for everyone for use anywhere, anytime, with any email account."

Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop gives users access to the same sleek Zimbra experience, and showcases the latest technologies that have until now only been available via Web-based applications including:

• "Mash-ups" with other services; for example, when viewing an e-mail, users can see their schedule by hovering over a date, or see the status of a flight by looking at a flight number;
• Powerful search that can quickly scan a user's e-mail and pull up relevant content;
• Built-in organization capabilities including automatically converting e-mails into conversations and advanced tagging; and
• Advanced calendaring that gives users access to their most important appointments and schedule even when they are on the go.

Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop also includes a number of features designed to help users stay organized, such as document creation, spreadsheets, task management and document storage, giving users a robust alternative to other desktop applications. New features include online and offline access to:

• Zimbra Documents, a document and spreadsheet program, which gives users the ability to embed complex objects such as photos into documents and spreadsheets. With the addition of Zimbra Documents, Zimbra Desktop users can easily create and edit documents and simple spreadsheets without having to switch between desktop programs or e-mail large attachments.
• Zimbra Briefcase, which allows users to upload, store, and conveniently access any files including spreadsheets, documents, presentations and others. Instead of keeping all attachments in e-mail you can simply store them in the same place with Zimbra Briefcase, and access them from anywhere, online or offline.
• Zimbra Tasks, a task management system which allows users to manage to-do lists simply and easily by monitoring start and due dates, priority, progress and percent complete.

Pricing and Availability

Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop Beta Version 3 is available for free download at zimbra.com/desktop. Anyone with access to Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS), Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL Mail, or an IMAP/POP enabled server can use Zimbra Desktop (www.zimbra.com/desktop).

Zimbra's Web client and server, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0 Open Source Edition is free. The commercially supported ZCS 5.0 Network Edition is available for a 60-day free trial on the Zimbra website. Zimbra's Hosted Demo (www.zimbra.com/demo) is available for an immediate test drive of ZCS.

ZCS Network Edition includes product support as well as software subscriptions to new releases, updates and patches. ZCS is available on-premise or as a hosted service and is available at a significant educational or non-profit discount. Please contact sales@zimbra.com for information. Users can discuss topics related to the Zimbra Collaboration Suite and provide feedback at www.zimbra.com/forums.

About Zimbra

Zimbra, a Yahoo! company, is a leading provider of messaging and collaboration software for universities, businesses and service providers. Zimbra's rich AJAX interface is available on or offline to dramatically improve the collaboration experience. Zimbra is available on-premise or on-demand through our extensive hosted partner program. More information at www.zimbra.com.

The BlackList

Wow!! Its been ten days already and not a posting, that's not encouraging and unlike me. I Promised at least on post a week.

The last couple of days was not really so spectacular. I was able to find the solution to the high response time we were heaving on the wan. Like I said, it was the cause of spammers connecting through our firewall to the mailserver and using the mailserver for spamming.

I tackled this problem, by first copying out all the unknown IP addresses connecting to through the firewall and blocked them from the Traffic Policy tab under configuration settings. I just denied everything from these IP addresses. I applied the recently changed settings, and then restarted KerioWinroute. I noticed that other unknown IP addresses were still connecting to the firewall. I concluded that since these spammers were targeting the mailserver, the best place to block them would be from KerioMailserver.

I logged into KerioMailserver, and went to blacklist, which is under spam filter under content filter tab. There, i added these ip address to the blacklist, and restarted the mailserver and the firewall. I still didnt see any major change. I did a google on blocklist and various kind of lists, to keep out spamming ip address from a network. I got some good blacklist, that were not included in the default configurtation of kerioMailserver and i added them. Well i restarted the firewall and mailserver after these configuration changes, and i noticed that things seemed much better.

For now everything is running fine, mails are going out and coming in as expected, and HTTP traffic from within the LAN is also much better. The response time is now as expected, and i do not have to stop and restart the firewall for new users conecting to the lan to be able to go online. I just have a fear that the balcklist i added to the list might be a little too restrictive and will probably block some genuwine emails from coming in.

Well illl wait and see if there are any complaints from users, and ill keep you posted.

Little Things Give You Away.

The last couple of days has been interesting and stressful at the same time. We got the License for the MailServer and Firewall as promised and surprisingly it came as promised on Monday. I was sort of surprised when i got the e-mail from Techsol with the License from Kerio in it. I was actually expecting the License on Tuesday. This just shows how competent Techsol is, and like i said they are really up to the task.

I quickly downloaded the new versions of both applications and ran the installation. I then added the Licenses to it and everything was up and running. I now had McAfee Antivirus running on my MailServer which would scan all incoming and outgoing emails. I decided that i will have a different Antivirus that will be running on the Firewall. This will make things really tight should in case one of the AV does not catch a particular virus, the other one will surely find it. I have not made up my mind yet on which of the AV's in the market this will be. Ill Google and then have a discussion with Techsol, and i think they will be able to advice me on that.

I finally got to know the reason why we were having so high response time. After so much work and thinking all these days, the answer came so easily. Because we had been running our Firewall without a license and no Antivirus on it all these while, a lot of doors had been open to attackers and spammers. Our IP address had been marked by these spammers. So any time we came online, they located us and attacked. From what i noticed, they used our MailServer for spamming. So anytime our Firewall was up, which gave them access to the MailServer, they attacked and started spamming through it. Now since our MailServer sends mails through the Firewall, they could not have access to the MailServer when the Firewall was down.

I noticed that while restarting the Firewall, only the users on our LAN are present on the Active Host tab. Then after a couple of minutes, i noticed a lot of unusual IP address that connected to the Firewall. Now clicking on these IP addresses to see there activities, i noticed they were all using our MailServer as there source and sending to other destinations. This was where our problems were coming from. It had been looking at me all these days and i never noticed it. What i did next was block everything on our MailServer's Block list, applied and restarted the Firewall. To my surprise, the response time was stable for over an hour, before there were some fluctuations.

I just learnt from this experience that just like in life, you should always look very well before you leap, also not to over look the little things in life. The little things are always the most important. Like Linkin Park said, "The little things give you away".

Ill keep you posted on my decision of Antivirus, and how i finally settled the matter of the high response time.

Description of Computer and Network threats.

This is a description of what the difference are between the various threats on a computer or network.

Adware
Adware (or spyware) is a small program that is designed to show advertisements (in various form and degrees of intrusiveness) on your computer. It often reports personal information back to its owners. As a result your sense of privacy can be violated.

Backdoor
A backdoor is a small malicious program that is used to gain access to a computer by bypassing the computer access security mechanisms. It gives the attacker almost unlimited rights. While it can be used to spy on a user, it is mainly used to install other malware on the system.

Heuristic
A technique designed to detect malware by empirical means but without having the specific data.

Malware
A generic name for all types of malicious programs: adware, backdoors, rogues, trojans, viruses and worms.

Rogue
A rogue program is a malicious program that is disguised, for instance, as trustworthy anti-spyware programs or registry cleaners. But these programs are only put on the market to scare you into buying these programs because they make exaggerated claims about the safety of your computer or, worse still, give erroneous scan results or put their own malware in your system.

Trojan
A trojan (or Trojan horse) is a small malicious program that pretends to have a particular function, but that only shows its real purpose after execution and that purpose is often destructive. Trojans cannot multiply themselves, which differentiates them from viruses and worms.

Virus
A virus is a small malicious program that multiplies and is capable to attach itself to other programs after being executed. It then causes an infection and causes various degrees of damage to your computer.

Worm
A worm is often characterized as a malicious application that will use a host machine to infect other machines. Therefore worms can create enormous damage on networks with multiple computers.

License on the way

Today is a good day. I did some major clean up in the house, and didn't leave for the office until about 3Pm, just one of those days that i have some time for myself and i have a 9ice time in the house listen to some good ole rap music and chill out.

Well i must say that i archived some things this week. I got my company to finally buy the license for the MailServer and Firewall. We paid for it on Thursday with a cheque of 400K. The actual value was 420, but yesterday i went to pay 20K in cash to them. We are getting the software from Techsol Professional Services Limited. They are one of the Kerio resellers in Nigeria. I was impressed with them actually. They were the only once that replied my email when i wrote to all the Kerio resellers in Nigeria, asking for a quote for a license. I got a returned mail from one of the supposed resellers and the other one didn't even border replying. Maybe they thought we were not serious. Well like i said, i am very impressed with Techsol, and i will continue doing business with them, because they have a great customer relation and are also resellers to HP, DELL, CISCO, Novell, APC, IBM, Microsoft and a host of others. I think that's why they take there business seriously unlike other Nigerian businesses. Techsol promised to send me the license latest on Tuesday. So by Tuesday, i can officially download the latest Kerio Firewall and MailServer application.

like i said, the week was OK and not so stressful. Just for the fact that i still had problem with unnecessarily high traffic on from my server. I still don't know where that is coming from, but i think its a malware or spyware problem. I found a very helpful website, that has a very good support for malware and spyware problem, and the guy that attended to me has been very helpful and all this for free. I think thats really interesting to give support for free. Should in case you have any malware or spyware problems, you can visit them here. If you want a direct link to the message i posted and how i was helped out you can visit it here. Well i used all the tools i was asked to use and my system was clean. I concluded that i had issues with my firewall, because when i stop it everything becomes normal on the network. As usual i will keep you updated.