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Challenges with Connect XD or requirements |
How Connect Xf addresses these challenges/requirements |
Security
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Internal Spam attacks
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Rate control to reduce impact of infected clients injecting large volumes of junk mail into the server.
Read more on how Connect Xf protects against Internal Spam Attacks
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Spoofing | User level spoof check to tighten the rules for allowing relay (authentication id must match envelop sender id and mime sender id)
Domain level spoof check to allow relay from internal clients only for mail with sender id belonging to sib.co.in
Read more about how IP Spoofing is restricted in Connect Xf
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Wire sniffing
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TLS implementation for all services to tighten client - server and server - server communication. |
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Password leakage
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Tighter password policies like defining the complexity rules and length such that users cannot set a simple password at all.
Password age to ensure expiry of password within a specified period.
Video on setting mail policies in Connect Xf
Read more on Password Policy
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Policy implementation per user and per group of people, to control the mail flow and usage based on corporate usage policies.
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Easier mail policy controls via the GUI which allow granular user level or group level controls. The controls are intuitive and reduce the number of policies by a large order. E.g. for a group of users, by default deny all mailing, but allow only these exceptions. These are also easier to manage since they apply entity wise rather than like a large sequence of policies.
Read more on Quota and Quota Policy
Video on setting mail policies in Connect Xf
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Access reports to track who all have logged in and when and how often and using which protocol (required for Audit)
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More than 25 MIS reports, like active users, inactive users, top senders, user login details, etc. Read more on Reports
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Vulnerabilities reported by security audits which point to a few medium and high risk issues
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Connect Xf fixes the reported vulnerabilities using a combination of upgrading to the latest OS, upgrading the open source components at the platform, and tightening the configuration of these components even further.
Read more on the Open Source components used in Connect Xf
To mitigate risks by hackers who send scripts to be executed in Baya, the system has a sanitisation engine to clean mail before it is pushed into the client. There are various levels of sanitisation to help clean the content.
Read more on Spam Control
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Performance
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Webmail client access
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Improvements in the use of of LDAP have helped improve performance on the web client. A completely overhauled directory structure ensures faster authentication and quicker response for all critical operations. The new directory structure considerably reduces the number of connections made to the backend database and directory servers. For example, in the new version, the number of LDAP connections for the delivery of a mail has been reduced to a single connection in comparison to 19 in the previous versions of the software, a 95% drop in the number of connections required. |
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Overall mail flow performance is slow sometimes. When the queues grow too large, it takes a long time to flush
| A new adaptive mail routing feature automatically selects the best routing path for your mail. This powerful new mail routing feature can directly deliver mail to parallel queues running on the server, thereby blasting mail delivery bottlenecks and ensuring faster mail delivery. In addition, this version introduces a caching service to help further reduce data access times during the critical mail delivery process. The combined effect of these improvements results in a drop of nearly 50% in the prequeue processing time. |
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Mails with large attachments to a group of users hogs bandwidth and storage (one copy per user)
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Mail with attachments sent to multiple recipients can consume large amounts of bandwidth, storage and choke mail traffic. The new Attachment Stripping feature remedies this by sending the mail stripped of all attachments to all the recipients. The stripped down mail is sent with links to access the attachments. By avoiding unnecessary duplication of data, the feature saves both on storage and bandwidth delivering a consistently high performance. E.g. for a daily report of 1MB to be sent to a group of 100 people, the feature can result in a yearly saving of about 36GB.
Read more on Attachment Stripping
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My directory lookups do not have a fallback option
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The new authentication module can automatically refer to more than one directory server (in a fail over mode) to authenticate an end user, ensuring that the authentication service (most heavily used service) is highly available even if key services such as LDAP or the application manager are unavailable. |
Manageability
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Difficulty or delay in searching through and retrieving from the archival on request for investigation
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Mithi recommends deploying the compliance archival solution to help you get quicker access to the archived mail. Easy search interface to find mails based on mail attributes like from, to, subject, etc
Read more on Compliance Mail Archival and Best Practices in Mail Archival
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Difficulty in limiting access by different levels of administrators
| Connect Xf offers the facility of defining roles for administrators which allows them only a few operations.
Video on setting mail policies in Connect Xf
Read more on defining and delegating roles
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Desktop client users, have to use web client to set their properties
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Mithi recommends the use of Thunderbird, which is a free, and reliable client. It supports the open calendar, address book and email protocols seamlessly. It is also tightly integrated with Connect Xf (a plugin allows the Thunderbird user to perform certain property modifications like password reset, vacation reply, etc from the client itself)
Read more on configuring Thunderbird Plugin
Download Thunderbird Desktop Client
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| My admin team has to use the Command Line Interfaces for managing the domain and entities
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Connect Xf has a GUI administrator console to ease up the effort of viewing and modifying the properties of entities (Users, Groups, COS, Domains) |
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Its cumbersome to manage properties and policies for groups of users. Have to do for each user and this is error prone and time consuming
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Connect Xf provides the concept of a COS (Class of service) which allows you to group the users into like types and apply properties to them in one go.
Video on provisioning COS
Read more on Class of Service
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Difficulty in managing the DR setup (the setup requires too much downtime and maintenance is cumbersome)
| Integration of the new versions of the DRBD and Heartbeat components for a faster, easier and more efficient Disaster Recovery solution. The improvements in the Disaster Recovery feature make it easier for you to manage and maintain the disaster recovery setup in addition to ensuring faster data replication between the primary and the secondary server.
Read more on new DRBD component integrated with Connect Xf
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| Managing the user subscription is not easy. We cannot track the total number of users and then at the point of regularisation, we face challenges of billing and cleanup | Connect Xf has a Subscription manager component, which tracks your purchased user count, and the subscription end date. As you use the system and approach thresholds, the administrative interface throws up alerts to enable you to refersh the subscription certificate by purchasing extra users or renewing the same.
Read more on License Manager
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| Mobility |
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Unable to sync Calendar, Address Book and use Chat from the mobile phones
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Connect Xf now supports more open standards which allow Android phones, tabs, pads, iPhone and iPad mobile devices to access Connect Xf over open protocols (SMTP, POP, IMAP, CalDav-calendar, LDAP-address book, XMPP-Chat) over commodity GPRS connections.
Read more on Mobile Email, setting up Connect Xf on Mobile Devices and how Connect Xf protects against internal spam attacks
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Webmail Client
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Signatures are plain text. Can we have rich text formatting available for these
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Connect Xf can set signatures in rich text formats.
Read more on support for formatted text for properties like Signature
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