Get to Know our Support Team: Interview with Dave Warren

Hi Dave. How old are you and what do you do at MailStore?

I’m 33 years old, and I make MailStore products work when someone finds a way to break it.

How long have you been working at MailStore and what did you do before that?

I’ve been with MailStore 2.5 years, prior to that I spent 8 years supporting Alt-N Technologies’ email server products, acting as the primary contact for their international distributor and reseller network.

What kinds of tasks does your job entail?

Routine pre-sales inquiries, “how-to” questions from existing customers, database repair and recovery for customers who have lost data after hardware failures, as well as creation and editing of both technical and marketing documentation, delivering webinars and technical training of coworkers and partners alike.

Are you currently working on any specific projects?

I’m currently focusing on assisting service providers bring the MailStore Service Provider Edition online from a technical perspective.

Which technical areas do you cover? What are your personal key areas of focus?

I cover virtually all areas of our products, although I especially enjoy finding unique ways to pull data out of unsupported and unknown email servers, clients and archives and bringing this data into MailStore.

What is special about email infrastructure and archiving from a technical support perspective?Are there any specific challenges?

Despite being a very old concept, email is a constantly moving and evolving technology, with people using email for everything ranging from general communication to a file-exchange mechanism, order management systems and more. No two customers use email quite the same way, and people have surprisingly different workflows, which are often reflected in the way they want to use an archiving product.

What is the trickiest case you have solved so far?

I had one case where a customer reported that archived email appeared and disappeared from MailStore Server. It turned out the stored data on a file server that he’s recently replaced, a coworker plugged in the old server and the DNS records periodically switched, so after a reboot he’d find MailStore Server connected to one database or the other randomly. Since both versions started as copies of the same data, it wasn’t immediately apparent that anything was actually wrong, other than recently archived messages being missing.

Are you interested in IT outside of work? What kinds of things are you doing at the moment?

I run an Active Directory domain at home as a hobby, along with self-hosted and collocated web servers, mail servers, and an Asterisk phone system.

What do you like to do most when you are not busy with IT?

I enjoy cooking, love a good road-trip into the mountains, and on occasion, enjoy interacting with other humans. But I usually prefer computers.

Read further staff interviews from Daniel Weuthen, Björn Meyn, and Lars Talaschus or return to blog entry “The MailStore Support Manifesto”.