Welcome to the March issue of Live Oak News.

In this Issue

	Our New Format
	Survey Results
	Important Mail Update
	Spam and Antivirus Solution - Live Oak Mail
	NEW! LiveOakDNS.com
	The Winner!!

In Other News

Looking for more regular updates?  Visit the Live Oak Blog at www.liveoakblog.com.

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Our New Format

Welcome to our first edition of Live Oak News.  Yes, that's it, Live Oak News.  Nothing catchy or witty.  We're just calling it what it is.

We're using new tools to improve our overall presentation and usability.  This new format gives us an insight into our readership, allows us to tailor our messages a bit, and most importantly, makes it easier for you to keep up to date with what's new inside of Live Oak these days.

In the months ahead, we'll be reporting about new services, enhanced services, and our progress on items you mentioned in our customer survey.  See the article below titled "Survey Results" for more details in that area.

As always, we welcome and encourage your feedback.  Please let us know how you like this new format and how we might improve it to make your life easier.

Sincerely,

Andy

Survey Results

As most of you know, we held our annual survey back in late January.  The feedback was quite positive and is a tremendous help in identifying areas of improvement and new service offerings for the remainder of the year.  Below is a quick recap of some of the highlights.

• Survey participation was about 25% of all customers
• Overall Experience: 73% Wonderful, 26% Average
• 89% would recommend Live Oak to a friend
• 95% thought our response time met your needs or was outstanding
• Friendly Service and Telephone Support was more important than price
• Spam Filtering was the most requested feature.  This tells us we're doing a bad job of educating our customers on our new spam filtering service.
  
• Secondary services of interest were: Email Archive & Retrieval, More Bandwidth and Disk Space, Virtual Private Servers, Shared calendars and contacts (ie, Exchange-type service), and Search Engine Optimization services

Be on the lookout for our next update when we announce how we're turning your feedback into action and making Live Oak better than ever!

Important Mail Update

Effective February 14th, all outbound mail originating from our servers is being routed through our outbound Ironport service. This outbound filtering is a free service to all customers and has several advantages.

• All outbound email will now be filtered for spam and viruses
• If you have a web form or desktop computer that gets hacked, the Ironport will likely block these emails and keep the server from being blacklisted
• Since the Ironport will help against blacklisting, expect fewer issues from our fine friends at AOL and Comcast
  

Now that the actual mail delivery process is being pushed off to the Ironport, we’re now able to reclaim some processing power back from each server. This means increased performance all around!

This new service also means that some of your outbound email potentially could be tagged as spam. While this isn’t very likely, it is technically possible. Should you experience any issues with mail delivery, please contact us with the date and subject of the email and we can track it down to verify the issue.

In the first 48 hours following the outbound filtering, we stopped several hundred thousand messages that normally would have been delivered as spam.  This led us to identify several mailboxes and web forms that were not secured.  We were able to quickly identify the offending sources, close the gaps, and email service is improving each day.

Spam and Antivirus Solution - Live Oak Mail

The number one issue identified in our survey was spam.  Ironically, this is the area that I'm happiest to report is a semi-solved problem.  I can't say it is completely solved as spammers are continuing to evolve their tactics and this requires a constant, watchful eye.  That being said, with our new IronPort device and the daily support of the Live Oak team, we're happy to say that inbound spam, when managed through the IronPort, is at an all-time low.  In fact, as of this writing, our accuracy is at 97.4% of all inbound email and we're averaging 2.6 Million emails a week.  Since this was the biggest issue reported and only a handful of our customers are using this service so we're going to be talking a lot about it over the next few months.

 
http://www.liveoakhosting.com/liveoakmail.php

Whether you need protection by the box, want your own Virtual IronPort, or are interested in becoming a reseller, we'll take care of you.

NEW! LiveOakDNS.com

After many months of preparation and planning, Live Oak is proud to announce our new manged DNS service.  We have offered limited access to our DNS management system for several months, but recently launched a brand new interface that we believe is the easiest and the best DNS interface available!

DNS is one of those services that we all love to forget about.  It can be complicated, confusing, and cumbersome to administer.  With that in mind, we have done our best to simplify the beast and still provide the power necessary to get the job done for the most complex administrator.

Since DNS is critical to the effective operations of all web and email services, we are limiting access to only those that are requesting this service.  This is a free service for all Live Oak hosted domains.  Anyone wishing to use our DNS tool for non-Live Oak domains, please see the pricing page at www.liveoakdns.com for more information.  If you'd like to have access to manage your domains in Live Oak DNS, please contact us and let us know.

The Winner!!

Congratulations to Pam Lefkowitz of Core Computing, the winner of our Best Quote Contest from our customer survey.

"Everybody at Live Oak smiles when they're on the phone! That's amazing! Nobody does that anymore. Setups are dead simple, problems (are there any?) are solved immediately, nobody ever makes me or my clients feel stupid, and the service is just there. I hate to say that you guys should go unnoticed, but I want my hosting service to be invisible - you guys make that happen. You are the company we love to forget about, if you get my drift."

Pam's quote not only entertains, but it brought a tear to my eye.  I hope you agree with how Pam feels about Live Oak.  And to thank Pam for her kind words, we're sending her a shiny new green iPod Shuffle!

Thank You, Pam!!