We’ll be doing some work on our mailserver tonight, so it’ll shut down for about a minute or so. The work will improve performance for all services, including POP and webmail. If you happen to be checking mail between 11 pm and 12 am Central time, and get an error, wait a few minutes, and it’ll resolve.
If you’ve called in this week, you may have spoken with Lee. While Adam is bumming around the Bahamas this week, Lee is graciously filling in.
We’ve had two mail server outages today: one for about 45 minutes at roughly 8:30 AM Eastern, and one for about 20 minutes this afternoon at 2:40 PM Eastern.
Both outages were due to an attempt by spammers to overload our mail server. This is commonly known as a Denial Of Service attack. Our systems admin worked during both to isolate and block the traffic causing the issue, while maintaining clear reception of mail, so no mail was lost.
We do apologize for the inconvenience.
Our colocation facility has notified us of a planned maintenance window that will upgrade their router and firewall system. This, in turn, should provide even better throughput for our services. The network is anticipated to be down for approximately 30 minutes at 1AM CDT, this Friday, March 6.
It was definitely a blessed Thanksgiving holiday here at Dogbark. We all had a chance to go and see our families and eat tons and tons of food. As Samuel and I got back into the swing of things in the office this morning he was complaining that something smelled terrible. Naturally everyone walked over to my desk to see if I had some leftover Turkey or something thrown in my trash can to stink up the joint, but this time it wasn’t me.
Samuel had left some hot chocolate in his mug for the entire break and it was stinking up the whole entire office. Don’t believe me? Check this out!! This makes me never want to drink any hot chocolate ever again… but at least this time it wasn’t my fault.
This is an oldy-but-a-goody. You may wonder why so many junk messages have an image in the contents, usually not attached. There are two reasons:
You may have noticed a severe drop in the amount of spam coming through to you. Two things have factored in to this wonder: our filters are continuing to learn the new profiles coming in, and a data center in California that was a major source of spam was shut down on Tuesday, 11/11.
A few days ago I got the horrible news that our token office PC was going to be taken home by a certain Samuel Rainey, M.A in order for him to watch football games, or something ridiculous like that, in his office at home. Don’t get me wrong, I am a 100% Apple Computer guy, have been for 6 years now, but I loved having the PC here so that I could walk through setup for Outlook with customers, as well as work with Internet Explorer for programming and development.
I have tried Parallels in the past and not had any luck with that whatsoever. Despite much work on my computer and how I set up the program I couldn’t get it to run fast enough for what I needed. I really don’t need / want windows, I just need the applications that windows runs. So the guys here turned me onto an application called “Crossover“.
We’ve all been there — staring at an unreal number of junk messages, wondering “who clicks through on this stuff? How do these guys make any money?”
Well, researchers at UC-Berkeley and UC-San Diego have published a study saying that spammers get, on average, an estimated 1 response per 12.5 million messages. Amazing. Click here to read the article.
Dogbark is now offering CAPTCHA image verification additions to websites. That means if you have a contact form, or any other form, on your site that is being spammed by a bot or script we can help stop it for you.
In short CAPTCHA forces your users to verify that they are a human being by entering letters stored inside of an image before a successful submission of a form can occur. So any spam-bots or scripts won’t be able to answer the questions and those form inputs don’t find their way into your email application or your database.
Please check out CAPTCHA Verification Page to find out more information about what this technology can do for you!