Managing a big address book can be a challenge, so it’s no surprise that the top request for Google contacts is a fast, easy way to merge duplicate contacts. You’ve been able to merge contacts one-by-one for a while, but now we’ve added a single button that merges all your duplicate contacts at once. To clean up your contact list in one fell swoop, just click the “Find duplicates” button in the contact manager, review the merge suggestions (and uncheck any suggestions you don’t want merged), and hit the “Merge” button.

If you’ve been considering getting all your contacts into Gmail or syncing your Gmail contacts to your phone, now’s the time to do it. As we’ve written about previously, you can sync your contacts to a wide variety of devices (including Android, iPhone, Blackberry, SyncML, etc). So if you were dreading spending hours getting your contacts in order, now you can do it with a couple clicks.

For more details, go here.

MxToolBox is also proud to offer their rock star support team who will help your company implement any and all changes needed in order to make your transition over to Google Apps as smooth as possible. Switching to a new email service can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be! You can even test our service with a subset of your users and let them explore all the features before completing the transition.  “The migration to Google Apps was very simple and painless, and that’s exactly what we were hoping for. I foresee the collaboration tools in Google Apps growing in importance, as our sales partners start to use Google Docs to collaborate with vendors, customers, and folks here at corporate,” said Shawn Faulkingham, Director of IT, Indoff, Inc.

MxToolBox has a track record for innovation and deployment of on-demand solutions. Along with announcement of their revolutionary Zimbra Emergency Mail Product a year  ago, MxToolBox has always been on the cutting edge with Email Continuity and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Both the Google Apps and Google Security and Compliance Products are an excellent fit with MxToolBox and we are excited to now be offering these new products to our current and future customers. Google Apps is available for purchase immediately from MxToolBox here or if you have questions about the product, please feel free to call us at 1-866-MXTOOLBOX or email sales@mxtoolbox.com.

• Essential messaging apps – Gmail and Google Calendar are included.
• Continuous innovation – Put the web’s rapid pace of innovation to work for your business. New features
• Lower cost – No hardware, software or patches, so you save money. Estimate your savings
• Universal access – Access your data from anywhere. Connect with IMAP, POP or from mobile devices.
• Enterprise-class service – Google Apps includes a 99.9% uptime SLA. *Phone support is available for critical issues.
• Secure infrastructure – Multiple layers of protection keep your business data safe and secure. Learn more

Why businesses use Google Apps for professional email accounts

• Get control of spam – Advanced filters keep spam from your inbox so you can focus on messages that matter.
• Keep all your important email – 25 GB of storage per user lets you keep just about anything you think may be important down the road.
• Unified communications – Email, instant message, and make high-quality voice and video communication without launching a separate application.
  • Voice and video chat from your inbox
  • IM from your inbox
• Find old messages instantly – Google search technology is built in, so you can find emails and instant message conversations quickly.
  • Find emails fast
• Prevent data leaks – Create custom inbound and outbound policies to keep sensitive information safe with Email Security.

Why businesses manage their time with Google Calendar

• Get people together easily – Just pick a time (based on when people are free) and enter meeting details. Google Calendar will send invitations and keep track of RSVPs.
  • Schedule a meeting
• Keep all your important email – 25 GB of storage per user lets you keep just about anything you think may be important down the road.
• Share project calendars – Share whole calendars company-wide or with specific people. Coworkers can have editing rights and see shared events alongside their own schedules.
  • Share a calendar
• Show event information in context – Embed an internal calendar in Google Sites or publicly on your website, no programming required.
  • Show a calendar in Google Sites

The system has already proven itself in real-world situations and the ease of changing over to Google Apps.  Mike Campbell, Director of Information Technology at Eli Research, Inc. said “Why move our internal email infrastructure to Gmail? Because I get all the upside of a huge scale upgrade, and I don’t need to revise my budget or put extra equipment in my server rooms or add internal support to ensure uptime, or even teach users to use it. It’s a natural.”

Google Apps is available for purchase immediately from MxToolBox here.

MxToolBox is on Twitter! Make sure to follow us so that you stay up to date on any changes to our system, new blogs, new information etc.

Peter and his son James

In these challenging times, all companies are looking for new places to cut costs and save on cash flow. One of the biggest challenges faced by every business is how to be fiscally responsible while still having the skilled people you need helping you grow your business. E-mail servers are large investments and the cost of keeping one up and running can be a big cash drain. Transitioning to hosted e-mail can be a responsible move for your company.

Everyone is looking at cutting costs right now and one of the ways that those costs can be cut where your company will benefit is through the use of MxToolBox e-mail hosting service. MxToolBox offers the world class Zimbra service that allows you to access your e-mail from any computer or smart phone. Our service will protect you from spam, keep you secure and you won’t have to worry about having your own server.

You can save money and grow during this tough time with a skilled staff at your fingertips. When you use the e-mail service from MxToolBox you not only get the most secure and best e-mail service available, you also get a team of experts who are available 24 hours a day to help with any challenges you encounter. Our technical team is not only the best in the field; they want to talk to you.

In the first in a series, we would like you to get to know our staff better. We know that we hire the best in the business, people who are technically savvy as well as outgoing and customer oriented. We want you to know them too.

Peter LeBlond is the Product Development Engineer for MxToolBox. Peter has a Bachelor of Science degree from Georgia Tech where he focused on Human Computer Interaction with a focus on Networking. Peter has over seven years of experience and he is one of the lucky few of us who uses his degree every day.

Like the rest of our team, Peter, is a key asset to MxToolBox and our customers. We hire people with the best skills so that we can offer the best service to our customers. Peter’s expertise in Human Computer Interaction means that he has the skills to make your experience at MxToolBox as good as it gets. Peter is skilled at making the computer your friend and making your interaction with our software seamless and comfortable.

Peter is a computer specialist at his core, and even when he is home Peter can be found working on his computer and investigating new software development.

Peter loves the ability to use his expertise at MxToolBox, but he also loves to solve problems and interact with customers. That means that when Peter gets a call about a challenge that a customer is having you know it is making his day to address that challenge and solve any difficulties that may have arisen. He truly wants our customers to be happy and when he can solve a problem and make someone’s day…well that’s his calling card.

MxToolBox is on Twitter! Make sure to follow us so that you stay up to date on any changes to our system, new blogs, new information etc.

The product, called Emergency MailTM Zimbra Edition (EmZ), allows businesses with an on-premise email system to run in parallel with hosted Zimbra servers.   Most popular business email systems including all versions of Microsoft Exchange are supported.

Copies of all email messages are backed up in real time on Zimbra servers hosted in highly redundant MxToolBox data centers.  In the event of fire, natural disasters, or server failures, users can continue to communicate with each other and conduct business remotely without disruption simply by accessing their Emergency Mail account.

MxToolBox selected Zimbra, a Yahoo! company, to provide underlying mail server technology because of their best-of-breed anywhere access from virtually any device, and advanced mailbox search capabilities which are critical in a disaster recovery situation.

We are excited about MxToolBox Emergency Mail Zimbra Edition, it’s an innovative use of Zimbra’s technology and solves a critical business continuity risk facing IT Managers, said Scott Dietzen, Yahoo! vice president.  MxToolBox customers have access to a best-of-breed email and collaboration solution 24/7.

The searchable Emergency Mailbox is always available to the end users via the Zimbra AJAX web interface.   Unlike more common replication systems, FlexBox routing technology from MxToolBox scales from businesses from a few users up to thousands, making it one of the first Email Continuity solutions cost effective for small business customers.

The system has already proven itself in real-world situations.  John Autry, Manager of Information Systems for the City of Slidell in southern Louisiana notes numerous times our exchange server has been down and everyone was able to still use their email with the emergency mail.?

MxToolBox founder Eric Rachal describes, the real power behind our approach is that users can decide themselves when to use their Zimbra Emergency mailbox which means zero switchover time, and zero intervention by IT staff to engage or disengage the system.    When the customer?s email server comes back up, copies of all messages during the outage are reconciled back with the customer mail server.

Because the system is always available, some IT managers are even using it to lessen the impact of planned downtime.  Major weekend upgrades becomes much less risky when your users never lose access to email, Rachal notes.

MxToolBox had customers on an earlier version of the service in 2005 who were effected by hurricane Katrina.  Some of those customers decided never to plug their mail servers back in, so this version also offers a seamless migration path to a fully managed Zimbra solution via drag and drop web interface.

The service is available immediately from MxToolBox on a monthly subscription basis with pricing starting at $1.99 per user.

FlexBox Services

Junk Mail is a spam and virus filtering service for email servers. Junk Mail has inbound and outbound mail filtering with free spooling, it includes Lock Down and the ability to use our Protected Outbound Relay (Smarthost).

Emergency Mailis an always on, always up to date backup email box. The mailbox has a rolling 30-day email history and is always ready. There is zero switchover time, zero IT Intervention and zero switch back time. Emergency Mail is provisioned on a per user basis. This feature also includes spam and virus filtering, Lock Down and our Protect Outbound Relay (Smarthost)

Managed Mail is a fully hosted email service with high-end security and enterprise grade redundancy. Managed Mail is provisioned on a per user basis. This feature also includes spam and virus filtering and SMTP Outbound access.

Managed Mail Pro is a email and collaboration solution with shared synchronized contacts and calendars. Managed Mail Pro also offers shared wikis and many other web 2.0 productivity features. Managed Mail Pro is provisioned on a per user basis. This feature also includes spam and virus filtering and SMTP Outbound access.

Mobile device Synchronization and Email Archiving are also available.  All services are available immediately to organizations throughout North America. And, if you are an IT Consultant or Solutions Provider, we are happy to announce that we have a FlexBox Email Services Partner Program.

The offering allows IT service firms and VARs to automate the acquisition, provisioning, support and billing of leading software service offerings.

ServiceBox is the culmination of the firm?s five year track record of automating the delivery of email messaging and security services to small and mid-sized business. The firm currently has distribution relationships with leading vendors in the space. Current partners include Yahoo! (via their acquisition of Zimbra) and Google? Messaging (via their acquisition of Postini). MxToolBox services thousands of businesses today, with hundreds of channel partners throughout North America.

Company representatives describe ServiceBox as a powerful tool that integrates the entire on-demand IT service chain into an automated, simplified package.

Partners and IT consultants, starting with a single customer order, can use ServiceBox to sell, support and bill their customers directly, or allow MxToolBox to handle selected portions. For larger partners, fully integrated support help desk and accounting modules streamline business operations, contract management, technical support and sales pipeline.

When we started selling software service offerings back in 2003, there were no tools to help automate business processes around recurring revenue streams. Everyone was still thinking in terms of SKUs and traditional distribution. Surprisingly, this is still the case five years later, says Eric Rachal, CEO of MxToolBox.

Rachal continues, The supply chain and distribution channels behind SaaS are rapidly evolving into a complex mess. Vendors and OEMs are struggling to figure it out. Our goal is to make sure the customer never sees that.

MxToolBox is making key elements of the technology available at no charge to qualified information technology service firms through-out North America who place orders through the service. The initial inventory of services available includes Junk Mail filtering, Emergency Mail for business continuity, email monitoring and hosting. The firm
expects additional product announcements and partnerships in the near future.

About MxToolBox

MxToolbox (mxtoolbox.com) is headquartered in Austin, Texas. The company provides on-demand IT Business Management software and innovative on-demand messaging infrastructure and security services to the small and medium-sized business market throughout North America. The company also provides online email diagnostic tools that are used by tens of thousands of email administrators every day.

MxToolBox, Inc. announced today that it has added six blacklists, also known as blocklists, RBLs, or DNSBLs, to its popular email blacklist lookup tool. The MxToolBox blacklist lookup tool will now check IP Addresses for listing on the MSRBL-Images, MSRBL-Phishing, MSRBL-Spam, MSRBL-Viruses, MSRBL-Combined and SpamHaus PBL blacklists, in addition to the 130 plus blacklists the tool currently checks.

The company added the lists to the tool to improve the quality of results for users. ?We constantly work to make sure we have the most valuable, up-to-date list of Blacklists available to our users,? Founding CEO Eric Rachal said. ?If there is a list that might cause deliverability problems for legitimate email users, we want to make sure that it is included it in our tool.?

Blacklists are lists of IP Addresses that have sent spam or have exploitable characteristics. Blacklists are commonly employed by email administrators to block incoming spam. There are dozens of blacklists available for use and each has a unique criteria for including an IP Address. For example, some lists include IP Addresses serving machines that are infected with worms and viruses, and others list IP Addresses within dynamic ranges. While blacklists certainly help fight spam, they can also block legitimate emails from non-spamming IP Addresses, an event referred to as a false positive.

The MxToolBox Blacklist Lookup tool is a free service that allows email administrators and users for non-spamming organizations who are having email deliverability problems to identify any blacklists that list their IP Addresses and see the reasons for the listing. The company also provides free blacklist consultations to companies who are listed or want to proactively avoid being listed. For non-spamming companies with blacklisted IP Addresses that cannot solve the problem, MxToolBox offers unique paid services to permanently eliminate the problem.

Joel Harvey, Director of Marketing explains, ?The blacklist tool is not about email blacklists as much as it is about email deliverability. That is what our tool and our services are designed to do?enable and ensure the delivery of legitimate, non-spam email. The first step is to find out that you have a problem, like a blacklisted IP. The next step is to find out why. You may have a virus, you may have some configuration issues, or you may have an IP Address in an un-trusted range. The final step is to take action so that your critical outbound email starts flowing again.?

About MxToolBox, Inc.

MxToolBox.com is a popular website among IT professionals across the globe. The website has free tools that help users uncover, diagnose and fix messaging related problems. The company?s suite of free tools include MX Records Lookup, Server Diagnostics, Blacklist Lookup, SPF Records Lookup, and Free Mail Server Monitoring.   

MxToolBox, Inc. offers innovative on-demand messaging infrastructure to the small and medium business market throughout North America. The company provides leading edge ?Flip the Switch” messaging services to small and medium sized businesses, including email spam and virus filtering, blacklist protection, hosted email and groupware, email disaster recovery and email archiving.

In celebration of National Small Business Month, MxToolBox, Inc. is offering free Email Archiving for new accounts with its FlexBox Business Email Hosting service throughout the month of May. Small Businesses that take advantage of the offer essentially will have free email archiving imbedded with a premium email hosting service for life.

?Small Businesses are becoming increasingly concerned with storing and accessing electronic business communications,? said CEO Eric Rachal. ?Recent developments, such as the new Federal eDiscovery Rule and NASD Small Business Continuity Plan Requirements, are driving small business managers to consider the implications of electronic discovery requirements. Preserving the vast amount of business information that is contained within email has also become a major concern? Rachal added, ?But, until now, email archiving has been both technologically and cost prohibitive to most small businesses.?

The imbedded email archiving feature within the FlexBox Hosted Email and Groupware package is ideal for small businesses, because it eliminates the need for multiple vendors and platforms, while ensuring that all company emails are preserved and easily retrieved/reproduced for as long as company policy requires. The email archiving feature saves all sent and received emails withint a given account. Even when a user deltes a message from their mailbox, the message remains in the archiving box. All emails and files are indexed for rapid retreival.

The FlexBox Hosted Email and Groupware service is an ultra-secure, ultra-reliable email hosting system designed to give small businesses all of the features that they would get if they had a professionally managed, dedicated email server in-house, without the excessive cost and administrative burden.

?Small Businesses absolutely need the same level of sophistication and functionality from their email systems as large enterprises,? continued Rachal, ?It usually just doesn?t make financial sense for them to manage those systems themselves. That?s why we created FlexBox?to give small businesses the security, reliability, flexibility, service and collaborative features that they need, at a price that makes sense.?

FlexBox Hosted Email is based on the Hosted Zimbra mail platform and includes shared synchronized calendars, shared synchronized contacts, shared documents, enterprise grade spam and virus filtering, blacklist protection, one gigabyte of storage per user, and more. The system is designed to work with multiple operating systems, including Windows and Mac, plugs into most desktop mail clients, such as Outlook and Apple Mail, and has an intuitive, powerful AJAX web interface. As an additional bonus, customers can opt to add full synchronization of mobile devices.
 

When discussing the system?s features, Joel Harvey, MxToolBox?s Director of Marketing chimed in, ?These features mean less to small businesses than the results they lead to. At the end of the day, FlexBox lets business managers rest easy. They know that their email is going to work. Messages will be delivered when and where they are supposed to be. Inboxes will not be flooded with spam. Dangerous viruses will be kept off of the network. Blacklists will not be a problem. Additional service needs, such as mobile device synchronization and archiving, can be easily added. Support for PC and Mac users is equally simple. And employees will be happier and far more productive.?

To take advantage of the Email Archiving offer, businesses should contact the company at 866-MxToolBox (866-698-6652) or on the web at www.mxtoolbox.com.

About MxToolBox, Inc.
MxToolBox, Inc. offers innovative on-demand messaging infrastructure to the small and medium business market throughout North America. The company provides leading edge ?Flip the Switch? on demand messaging services, including email spam and virus filtering, blacklist protection, email hosting, and email archiving.

“We are re-branding because the IT community that uses our tools and services knows us as MxToolBox. We are changing our name to make it easier for people to do business with us and to eliminate any confusion that comes from operating under two names,” says CEO Eric Rachal. “For some customers, our name has changed, but our intense customer service ethic and our unwavering commitment to providing value absolutely has not.”

Company officials were careful to emphasize that eTools Group, Inc. was not bought by another company and is run by the same people and the same technology that its customers have come to know and rely on.  The company will be calling customers and sending letters with invoices to make sure customers understand the change. “The only discernable change that our eTools Group customers will see,” said Rachal, ” is the logo on their invoices will change from the eTools logo to the MxToolBox logo.”

MXToolbox.com is a popular website among IT professionals across the globe. The website has free tools that help users uncover, diagnose and fix messaging related problems. In an era when more and more companies are trying to charge users for access to content and tools, MxToolBox, Inc. is adamant about keeping its free tools separate from its paid services.

The company offers a suite of tools that allow users to test the health of their email systems and to diagnose email related problems. The tools include MX Records Lookup, Server Diagnostics, Blacklist Lookup, SPF Records Lookup, and Free Mail Server Monitoring.   

“We believe in providing value to the IT and business communities, whether to a client or someone at-large,” says Joel Harvey, Director of Marketing. “The free tools, or MX Widgets, are our way of doing that. Yes, we have paid services that thousands of IT professionals use to solve problems and keep them from reoccurring. Yes, we could charge for our widgets as well. But, in the end that would dilute the value that we provide, which is the last thing we want to do.”

MXToolbox.com announced that it has removed the BLARS Blacklist from its Blacklist lookup tool.

[ClickPress, Wed Dec 20 2006] MX Toolbox announced today that it has removed the BLARS Blacklist from its popular Blacklists Lookup tool. The company stated that they removed BLARS as part of on-going quality assurance efforts. The BLARS website has been taken down and there is no available contact information.

According to company representative, the BLARS Blacklist is a notoriously unreliable list for blocking spam, because it practices net blocking, where large ranges of IP addresses are blacklisted. The list?s aggressive net blocking practices have historically led to very high numbers of false positives.

Company representatives stressed that removing BLARS from the blacklist results will not diminish the quality of the lookup tool at all. Instead, it will ensure that the lookup results are as meaningful and accurate as possible, and that users are not inadvertently startled to find their mail server address on a blacklist when there is no reason for concern.

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About MX Toolbox
MX Toolbox offers on-demand messaging infrastructure to the small and medium business market throughout North America. The company provides leading edge ?Flip the Switch? on demand services, including email spam and virus filtering, blacklist protection, hosted groupware and email, remote data backup, email encryption, email archiving, IM Filtering, IM Archiving, and Web Content and Virus Filtering.

http://www.clickpress.com/releases/Detailed/23913005cp.shtml