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Updated: 16 April
2002
WebMail / Provincial Server
down
The server running Chebucto Community Net's WebMail service and the Nova
Scotia Provincial Server crashed under mysterious circumstances during the
night Monday, according to the Chebucto Technical Committee. Technical
Committee staff and volunteers are working on solutions to the problem
including one option of rushing a new updated version of the WebMail into
active service on one of the new servers. Mail to Chebucto users is
unaffected by the WebMail server crash and is still available by direct
text-service dialup, telnet, SSH (encrypted telnet), and POP3 download.
All WebMail, Provincial server services and other resources hosted on the
server will be available again as soon as possible.
Low-Cost Custom Web Addresses Now
Available
Chebucto users, groups and businesses can now have low cost custom website
and email addresses. For $20 a year or less,
full details here,
users can have a custom Chebucto Sub-Domain name.
Non-Profit groups on Chebucto can have the website address name.chebucto.org, where name would be replaced by the
organization or group name. Small businesses on Chebucto can customize the
website address name.chebucto.biz; individuals and
families can customize name.chebucto.net with their family
name; and Chebucto-based
information resources can customize the web address name.chebucto.info.
Email aliases to registered Chebucto sub-domain names are also available
for $10 per year per alias. These email aliases can redirect mail to any
email account.
Chebucto spam flood continues,
mail to dead accounts stopped
A recent onslaught of spam (unsolicited commercial email) has been hitting
Chebucto users causing text logins and Chebucto mail services to lag. The
Chebucto Technical Committee is actively working on ways to cut down on
incoming spam and its related problems, such as mail bounces caused by
spam filling unattended user mailboxes.
As a result of the massive influx of junk email, a long time policy of
accepting email for suspended expired accounts has been changed. When a
Chebucto user account expires, 30 days later the account is suspended and
no longer can be accessed by the user.
In the past, the account would continue to accept new mail until the user
mailbox was full. Once this happened, the mail program would attempt to
deliver any new email to the account every ten minutes for three days
before bouncing the message back to the sender. With more than 10,000
emails in the mail queue trying to be delivered to user mailboxes that
were either full or expired, the entire mail system was overloaded.
The mail system is now set to immediately bounce any incoming mail for
suspended mail accounts - that is, accounts locked down 30 days after the
user account has expired. Mail to accounts that are still active but have
overflowed their mailbox will still be retried for three days, as before,
to allow users opportunity to remove the excess mail without losing new
mail.
Chebucto currently blocks all mail originating from more than 1900
spam-sending servers, but this is proving to be insufficient as spammers
develop new ways to send their mail. One recent trick has been to highjack
Korean high school proxy servers which are unsecured for email relaying
since they weren't set up to deliver mail at all. Another dodge has spam
software using regular dialup accounts to directly send mail to the
internet. Since the web address of these will change for every dialup,
blocks on static server names are ineffective.
Chebucto's advice to our users is to never reply to a spam email,
even honest-sounding ones that claim they will honour a remove request or
are being sent in accordance with the law. These are utter lies and will
only result in a user's email address being sold at a premium to other
spammers as "verified". Some spammers are now forging who the spam is
coming from using a valid email address pulled from their lists at random
as the reply-to address. The innocent third party then gets deluged with
remove requests and mail bounces from spam getting sent to invalid
addresses. Chebucto also advises our users to never buy a
spam-advertised item or service as this only serves to reward the
spammers' efforts.
New Membership Reward Plan!
Chebucto is pleased to announce a new Membership Reward Plan open
to all current Chebucto members. Full
Details here.
For each new Sustaining or Family Sustaining member who tells us
they were referred to us by you, we'll give you a $20 credit good towards
your next Sustaining or Family Sustaining membership. "Word of mouth"
advertising can now get you free internet: five referrals are good for a
free Sustaining membership, including a year of our famous
Chebucto Plus full graphical access.
Chebucto Users tops in *.NS.CA
SETI processing
SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, has been processing
their radio telescope data with home users' computers for years now. Using
an innovative
screensaver which runs whenever the user computer is not in use, SETI
has had more than 948,000 years of high quality computer processor time
donated to it.
Of all the computer domains ending in the letters NS.CA, denoting Nova
Scotia, chebucto.ns.ca now ranks
number one, beating out both the government of Nova Scotia and the vast
resources of EdNet, the schools network. Current stats here.
Chebucto users have sent in more than 13,000 results, representing more
than 28 years of CPU time that would otherwise have been wasted.
Outlook user email advisory
After the recent wave of viruses specifically targetting users of
Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express email programs, and the constant
stream of user complaints about randomly altered program settings and
difficulty using the program, the Chebucto Community Net Office and the
Chebucto Technical Committee recommend our users do not use either Outlook
or Outlook Express as their email program.
Windows Users can find a selection of email programs available for
download
here and Macintosh
users can find a selection of email programs
here.
Go to the Beacon
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