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It was a busy week in the Email Hosting sector. Here are some of the major stories from TMCnet.

Message Bus has introduced the first-ever email guarantee for transactional and triggered emails. These emails can be password resets, abandoned shopping cart notifications, delivery confirmations, receipts and other interactive messages.

In addition, while social media may get all the attention, email is still better for many things. Email hosting is still largely used by businesses to keep employees connected, for example. Email is also seen as a more effective marketing tool than Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter. Email outperforms social media advertising three to one, according to the Direct Marketing Association.

This information is especially important during the holiday shopping season, which, according to the National Retail Federation, will see sales rise 4.1 percent to around $586.1 billion.

TMCnet also reported how DomainPeople, the eighth official domain name registrar accredited by the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, recently announced it is offering Hosted Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange services. Designed for companies seeking a corporate email hosting solution with no capital outlays, in-house bandwidth requirements, or internal IT staff overhead, Hosted Microsoft Exchange offers a value-added standard package that includes Outlook, anti-virus/anti-spam functions, and advanced features such as automated directory sync, at no extra charge.

In addition, deploying a unified email signature in an organization is one of the main challenges many companies encounter today. To counteract this problem, CodeTwo, which provides email hosting solution MS Exchange and Outlook-based software solutions, recently launched a new Email Signature Manager. The program allows users to set a unified signature for their entire company in Microsoft Outlook, OWA or Office 365.

And TMCnet reported that the battle for email hosting dominance is fierce. For a long time Microsoft dominated the space. Then came Google (News - Alert) Apps, which brought cloud-based email hosting to market. Microsoft answered the Google threat last year with the release of Office 365, and it is shoring up its position by leveraging the recently released Windows 8 to entice users with a single, unified environment that mixes their desktop and cloud solutions with the same interface.

A new challenge comes from Samba 4.0, the open source file, print, and authentication server suite. Samba 4.0 brings full support for Active Directory, the directory service from Microsoft for Windows domain networks. 

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO Miami 2013, Jan 29- Feb. 1 in Miami, Florida.  Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.