Euro Fast Host

Hi,

We have two kinds of spam filtering - free (which can be configured in your web mail - mail.yourdomain.com) and advanced (for which there is a small monthly fee).

The advanced filtering is provided by a third party company and unfortunately, as many of you will know, they recently performed an upgrade which did not go well. In fact, it has gone so badly that they have now contacted us (and many other ISPs) to say that they do not have any confidence that they will be able to get it working again. They are therefore intending to run a much reduced service from this Friday 4th May. The reduced system will still filter spam, but will not provide quarantine reports nor any way to release trapped messages - they will simply be deleted.

We do not think this is acceptable (since email can ultimately be lost) so we are withdrawing the service. We will be contacting all affected customers over the next few days. So, this is the bad news.

Now, the good news. We have been trialing a new in-house system with similar functionality and we hope it will provide an even better alternative. The earliest release date for this is the end of next week depending on trials and feedback. We will automatically move current advanced spam filtering customers onto the new service.

We will of course refund ay affected customers for any time during which their spam filtering has not been working as expected.

We are sorry this has happened, especially at such short notice, but we along with many other ISPs have been let down by the supplier.

We will provide further updates when we can and, as mentioned, hope to have the new service up an running towards the end of next week.

Hi,

We will be at Internet World this Thursday 3rd May. Not exhibiting, but taking a look a look around at what’s hot. There will be Duncan, Andy, Rich, and Darren - if anyone wants to meet up, just send an email to duncan@eurofasthost.com and we’ll catch up. And, because it’s such a long way from Yorkshire, we’ll be staying over on Thursday night and enjoying a night on the town

Duncan

For some reason my laptop (Advent 7093) recently stopped working. After some investigation it appeared that it would only boot up if just one of the SODIMMs was installed. With two, it wouldn’t boot at all. Bit odd, but there you go.

The laptop came with two 512MB SODIMMs so with only one, it was trying to run Vista Business with just 512MB ram, and it was painful to say the least… so bad it was practically unusable, It improved slightly after running the system optimiser to get a new “Windows Experience Index”. But still, it wasn’t really useable without a lot of patience.

So, I got a new 1GB SODIMM and installed that, and it’s back to being a pleasure to use. But it seems 1GB is the minimum to get decent performance from Vista.

Given my recent phone bill (following the trip to Tenerife) I thought it would be worth calling T-Mobile to see if I could get a phone upgrade (despite it being less than 12 months since the last one). The answer was yes, and I could have pretty much any phone.

So, despite having the MDA Vario Pro (and being very happy with it, especially the Push E-mail, which is fantastic), I ordered a Nokia N95.

My main requirement for a phone is for email - I am really not bothered by playing MP3s, videos etc. I also liked the idea of the built in sat-nav. And, I also liked the idea of the 5MP camera - I know I wont really use it, but its nice to think I might. And of course the high speed 3g (HSDPA) is great when using the phone for internet access on the laptop as I do quite regularly.

So how is it? Well, physically its great - a nice size, and the sliding front reveals a decent keypad (which makes a change from the touch-screen of the MDA).  The keys are easy to use, and as usual with Nokias, fairly intuitive. It does however feel a little flimsy, and the front is liable to slide open when being placed into a pocket.

The camera is great, and takes really good pictures. I don’t really use this facility much, but it’s nice to have and I may well use it more frequently now I always have a decent camera with me. Haven’t used the video camera facility since there isn’t enough storage space in the phone memory. I need to get a memory card for it (since Nokia doesn’t supply one in the box), then I’ll have a play.

The built in GPS is nice - looks a bit like Google Earth, but you need to pay (about £40 iirc) to get full voice navigation instructions. This can all be done from the handset with a credit card. I used the navigation in earnest for the first time a couple of days ago to find a location in Leeds. So I programmed it in South Cave and it quickly planned a route. In the car, the front was slid open to activate the GPS, and this took a few minutes before it found the satellites (although it was low down in the car, since I don’t have a cradle yet). It all worked really well until the M1 into Leeds when the phone decided to reboot for no apparent reason). There was nowhere to pull over, so by the time the phone had re-booted, opened the navigation software, re-found the satellites etc, I was well into Leeds and improvising on the route until the phone was back up to speed. That said, once it was running the navigation was easy to follow and worked a treat. And, the speakers on the Nokia N95 are first class - how they get such good quality sound out of such small speakers is a wonder.

The only real problem I have with it, is the very slow email access. I have setup an IMAP account, and when logging on to retrieve headers, it is *very* slow. It can take a couple of minutes just to download and display the headers. I have no idea why this is, but I hope a firmware update improves it. I also tried getting the phone to stay connected permanently so there is no need to logon for headers. This works, but it makes the otherwise excellent battery life very short.

Given that email is one of the main uses for my phone, it’s a bit disappointing, but at least it does work and you can send and receive emails. But, I was spoiled by the superb push email on the MDA Pro.

So, do I revert to the MDA Pro or stick with the Nokia N95? I’m not sure yet, but I’ll give the Nokia a few more days to see. It’s certainly much better as a phone, much more compact, and has better battery life. Nokia says its what computers have become, but it will be some time yet before the mobile comes close to PC functionality.

I was recently lucky enough to have a few days in Tenerife enjoying some pre-summer sunshine. As always, I took the laptop and mobile so I can stay in touch whilst away.

The setup was the latptop connecting via bluetooth to the phone, then using 3g to access the internet. As usual, this was no problem and all worked quite well. Can even VPN and connect to Exchange server, so it’s just like being in the office really.

But the big problem is cost. I already knew it was going to be £8 per MB - an extortionate amount, but needs must and if you’re careful, it shouldnt cost too much for a few days. So, I made sure not to download any large attachments, and keep web browsing to the essentials.

When I got back to the UK and my next phone bill arrived, I was a little shocked to see it was £1051! Now, I was sure I hadn’t downloaded as much as that.

But, I didn’t take Vista into account. I stupidly went to bed one night and left the laptop with the screen up (ie not in standby mode) and bluetooth enabled on the phone. And Vista decided it was the time to download an update of about 131MB… all over bluetooth / 3g and at £8 per MB

So, the phone bill was more than the entire trip to Tenerife. The moral of the story is…. Switch off the laptop and bluetooth!

Due to the very high levels of spam entering our network, we are now refusing to accept mail from remote hosts that do not have a reverse DNS entry. This cuts out a huge amount of spam from hitting our newtork and follows common accepted internet practise. This should not cause any problem to the vast majority of customers, but please let us know if you regularly receive email from a host with no reverse DNS entry.

In this scenario, the best option is to educate the sender into obtaining reverse DNS since their emails will be bouncing from other hosts. However, in exception cicrumstances we can allow particular hosts to send email without reverse DNS - this is done on a case by case basis.

Thanks,

Duncan

Hi,

Further to previous emails sent out to dedicated server customers, we have now implemented the new firewall and access rules. If you find you are unable to access your server via Terminal Services, or cannot access a SQL server via Enterprise Manager, please contact us so that your IP address can be added to the access list.

Thanks.

Duncan

Hi,

There will be some essential firewall maintenance this evening between midnight and 3am. There will is likely to be a short outage of all services during this time, but services should be considered “at risk” for the duration.

We will update here when the work is completed.

We apologise in advance for any inconvience.

Duncan

Hi,

Well, the greylisting trial went well. The inbound emails were down by approximately 80% over what we would normally expect on that server over a weekend. 80% spam… mad, isn’t it?

So, we now know that greylisting will have a dramatic effect on spam levels, but we still have the issue of delayed emails to dealt with.

We will probably contact all customers in advance of a full roll-out and ask them if they would like to opt-out of greylisting - hopefully most will be happy to accept the trade-off in return for at least and 80% reduction in spam.

More information will be posted here and emailed to domain administrators in advance of any futher changes.

Regards,

Duncan

Hi,

As part of our ongoing efforts to reduce the amount of spam inflicted upon our customers we are experimenting with greylisting.  This is a technique that some mail hosts report can reduce spam by 95% with no loss of legitimate mail. Sound great, doesn’t it?

But, as always, there are some drawbacks. The main on is the legitimate mail is delayed the first time it is sent from a particular sender. It works like this (see the link above for more information).

The sender looks up an MX record for a domain and this lists a mail host to deliver the email to. So, the sending mail server delivers the email to th reciipients mail server. When greylisting is enabled, the recipients mail server initially rejects the mail with a temporary error. The sending server then requeues the email for a second delivery attempt later. On the second delivery attempt, the recipient server accepts the email and delivers it as normal. Then, for a configurable future period mail from the same sender to the same recipient is delivered without delay.

The reason it works is that most spammers do not attempt to re-deliver the mail after the first rejection. Spammers use compromised machines to deliver their mail and they don’t care about proper MTA (message transfer agent) operation. So, legitimate mail will be delivered and spam lost. There are other reasons why this has an impact on spammers as well (more in the aritcle above).

As mentioned, the main problem with this approach is the initial delivery delay when mail is sent from a new sender. Imagine the sender is from an e-commerce site or a “forgotten password” link - they delay could be inconvenient.

So, we are not sure how customers would react to the implementation of greylisting. Would you be willing to have the odd delivery delay in return for a huge reduction of spam? Our guess is that, as usual, some will, and some won’t

Our plan therefore is to test it on one mail server over the weekend on every domain on that server. This will have minimum impact on business customers and allow us to see how much spam is stopped.

We will then re-enable normal delivery on Monday morning so there is no impact on customers.

Assuming the trial goes well we will then implement greylisting with an option to turn it off per domain - so for those who need instant delivery all the time they can have it and for those who want a spam free mailbox they can have it as well.

The solution for no spam and instant delivery would be our Advanced Spam Filtering solution at £1.50 per mailbox per month… customers content with the delay can have spam protection for free!

A futher update with the results of the trial will be posted on Monday. If anyone has serious issues over the weekend with the trial, please email me on duncan@eurofasthost.com and I can remove your domain from the trial.
Duncan

Hi,

There will be a brief outage of around 15 minutes this evening between 7pm and 8pm. This is to allow migration of a customer acccount from the shared mail platform to a dedicated one. Customers will be unable to send of receive mail during this time, but no mail will be lost.

We apologise in advance for this down time.

A further post will be made here when the work has been completed.

We have now retired Purple, a Cobalt Raq server that was hosting some legacy sites from some time ago. The site owners were contacted in advance, and the retirement went well - all sites are now migrated to other servers.

The retirement of purple marks the last of our Linux wervers - we are now 100% Windows based hosting. That’s not to say we wont offer Linux hosting packages again in the future, but at the moment we are concentrating on strengthening our windows web hosting services.

I have installed Windows Vista Business and Office 2007 on my laptop - it wasn’t a particular goal, but the laptop had started having a few issues, so I thought I’d give it a go.

The laptop is an Advent 7093 with Intel T2300 @ 1.66GHz with 1GB RAM so not a bad spec and within Microsoft’s recommendations for Vista.

So I popped in the Vista CD and followed the instructions - and opted for a reinstall rather than an upgrade (an upgrade seemed to be asking for trouble). It all went well until the install just seemed to hang with the progress bar not moving for around 20 minutes - not a good sign and it looked like it might fail.

But, patience won out and the install progressed nicely. Once it was done the system rebooted and proceeded to benchmark the laptop. A rating of 1 (poor) to 5 (best) is allocated according to performance based on various criteria (eg hard disk performance, graphics card etc). The laptop did well (3s and 4s) but the graphics card only got a 1 - so the whole laptop was restricted in terms of Vista features because of the poor performance of the graphics card.

To be honest, I was pretty disappointed - the graphics were slow, blurred and low res - making Vista look like something from ten years ago.

The reason, of course, was that the graphics card (Nvidia GeForce) driver had not been installed. So, a trip to Nvidia’s web site to download the driver and off we go - or so I thought. For some reason it wouldn’t install - either the Vista version of the driver or the XP version (running in compatibility mode). It either crashed or said it couldn’t detect the graphics card.

This was a bit of a pain, and I thought I would have to revert to XP. But with a bit of fiddling and then manually installing the driver (rather than detecting the card) and choosing the Nvidia dirver manually, we managed to get it installed - and the difference was dramatic!

Vista transformed into a *much* better experience (benchmark of 3 for the graphics card by the way) and I was happy again.

Things (predictably) take a bit of getting used to, particuarly setting up wireless networks and VPNs but with a bit of perseverance it’s not too much of a learning curve.

So, Office 2007 was installed, which has some really nice features. But by far the best for me is the “filter” option in Access and Excel, which makes it much quicker to use. I do a fair amount of data manipulation and these options make it much better - you can often run a standard filter on data without having to write a query.

So, overall I’m really pleased - it’s fast (although I’m sure you do need a decent spec), and reliable - so far haven’t had any operating system crashes. The only issue has been with Dreamweaver which needed a system roll back an reinstall. But apart from that, no problems.

And, it looks fantastic!

We run Microsoft Exchange Server internally for mails (via our public SmarterMail servers) and one of the options is DirectPush to mobile devices.

Basically, it means you can sync you Windows Mobile devices via 3G or GPRS so mail is “pushed” from Exchange as it arrives and is delivered direct to your PDA wherever you are. When I’m out and about, it’s fantastic - email delivered direct to the phone (a T-Mobile MDA Vario Pro by the way) and it’s really very useable.

So, is it something we should sell? Well, yes I think so. We will be installing a public exchange server and trialing it with some existing customers. If you would like to be part of the trial, please email duncan@eurofasthost.com and we’ll add you to the list.

There isn’t a definite timescale yet (we have a lot on with the new web site and revised packages) but it will be within the next few months.

Although we have provided dedicated servers for many years, this has generally been to existing customers who have outgrown shared server capabilites - we’ve never really advertised them on the web site.

But, that’s about to change. As part of our strategy review, we will soon be offering configurable dedicated servers to purchase online. We don’t have full package details or prices yet - we want to make sure we get the offering right - but we will be adding the dedicated server options to our new web site when it is launched (later this week hopefully!)

Hi,

We have been running IMAIL as a mail server for around 9 nine years, and it has served us very well. But the time has come to retire one of out Dell servers, so we’ll be installing a new high-spec Dell server and installing SmarterMail.

This means that the majority of our mail platform will be standardised on SmarterMail. Since installing v4 a week or two ago, we have been very impressed with the stability (barring a few teething issues) and the over usability for both admins and end users.

So, for customers with Imail accounts, we will be contacting you all shortly to let you know when the migration will take place. No email will be lost but there may be some delivery delays, and you won’t be able to logon via POP3 or IMAP or web mail during the changeover, but as usual we will schedule it to be out of hours.

Immediate improvements you will notice will be a much faster response time (particularly for IMAP and web mail) and the interface for web mail will be much easier to use and faster.

We will also be implementing some of SmarterMails spam filtering services as well, but further information will be given on this once the performance of the system can be analysed after installation.

Web hosting has come a long way in the last twelve months, and our site is somewhat out of date. So, we will be launching a brand new site in the next few days which will have a much more up-to-date look, and of course it will be fully web standards based and accessible

But it’s not just a fresh new look… we will also be launching a full re-vamped range of hosting packages that reflect recent developments in web technology.

These will include:

1. One-click support for blogging software including Wordpress and Joomla (this blog is written with the excellent Wordpress). No excuse now for not adding a blog to your web site!

2. We already offer full support for .NET2 hosting, but it will be simpler than ever to install on your web space.

3. New statistics package - we have upgraded to the very latest version of SmarterStats, and we’ve gone for the Enterprise edition so you can get detailed web site statistics emailed to you as often as you’d like.

4. New mail package - SmarterMail 4 has been installed, which is a massive imporvement over previous versions. It supports calendering and integration with Outlook too.

5. One-click (well, nearly) installation of Oscommerce so you can quickly an easily build an e-commerce store.

There are lots of other new developments coming soon as well, including Helm4 support, which brings a whole new level of functionality to your web hosting control panel.

The upgrade to V4 is now complete. There were some upgrade issues that have caused mail delivery delays for some customers since Saturday evening - these have now been resolved. The issue was an obscure one that affected us and a few other SmarterTools customers - their support people worked through the night to resolve it - thanks guys.

Overall the new SmarterMail has many new features, including a much improved web interface and additional features for tackling spam.

We will post more when we have investigated the new features fully.

Thanks for your patience during the downtime.

We are pleased to say that SmarterStats, the excellent web site statistics software, has been upgraded from version 2 to version 3. You don’t need to do anything to take advantage of the upgrade - all of your accounts have been upgraded automatically.

If you don’t yet have stats on your site, then why not? They are invaluable for showing you how much traffic you have, and more importantly, where it comes from. Check how well your keywords are doing in google and other search engines. Stats can be added easily from your control panel.

As usual, if you have any problems, please let us know.

Spam is a real pain in the neck for both us and our customers. First, a little story about last week.

We noticed abnormal traffic coming into one our our mail servers and needed to investigate further. What was happening was this: Someone was spamming and using one of our domain names as a return address. This is quite common, but in this case it was a little more problematic than usual. The spammer puts a “from” address on their spam of xyz@whatever.com where xyz is usually a semi-random fictitious name. They then send their spam to hundreds of thousands or more email addresses. In many cases these addresses are for non-existent, closed, or full mailboxes and so the receiving server sends a non-delivery report to the “from” address - which in this case was for a domain on our network. But, because the first part of the from address was xyz or whatver, the mailbox didn’t exist on our server, so of course our mail server dutifully tries to send another non-delivery report. The result is a mess!

For a while, there was so much traffic (in excess of 100,000 inbound messages) that our server started to reject inbound mails, which obviously included legitimate email. So, what could be done?

Well, from the firewall point of view, it would be easy to reject all connections from a single or a few external hosts, but these bounces were from servers all over the world, so this wasn’t feasible.

We also have some content filtering ability, but it wasn’t flexible enough to filter SMTP content and drop it before it hit the network.

We can enable a “catch-all” mailbox so our servers just accepts all inbound mail and dumps it into a temporary mailbox.

We can “ride-it out” because usually the spammer will use the domain for a while then move on to some other innocent target. Usually the ISP of the spammer sending the mail will suspend the account of the culprit following complaints from other ISPs - but in this case, the sender was using computers of unknowing end-users who were running mail relays unsuspectingly (ie the mail was originating from all around the world rather than a single ISPs mail servers).

We can divert the MX records to a seperate machine which temporarily accepts mail for the domain to relieve the load on the main mail servers.

In the end, we implemented a combination of the above and the effect was mitigated. It did mean that some customers had temporary issues sending mail and there were delays for some ligitimate inbound mail. Fortunately, the internet email systems works such that if a mail server has an issues delivering email first time around (i.e. the recipients mail server is down or otherwise unavailable), it will usually queue the mail for further delivery attempts in the future. If it can’t deliver the mail after a configurable number of attempts, it will at least bounce the mail to the sender with a non-delivery report explaining the problem. Therefore, no mail should ultimately be lost.

So, what are the lessons here? The main ones are:

1. Don’t use catch-all email addresses - they just end up as honey-pots for spam. Setup individual POP3 accounts, and if needs be aliases for these accounts as well. This can all be done through our control panel.
2. Make sure anti-virus software is up to date to keep your computer secure and stop it being used as a spam relay. A typical symptom of this is a significant slow-down in your internet connection speed. If you are worried you are an open relay there are several free tools on the internet you can use to check - if you are unsure, give us a call and we’ll check for you.
3. Use a router instead of a modem for your internet connection. By using a router, you are by default much more secure than by using a modem. With a router, your externally visible IP address is assigned to the router rather than you PC so it acts as a barrier. We will shortly be launching a store where you can purchase routers as well as other hardware.
4. Use spam protection - we offer a very advanced and reliable spam filtering system which really will make your inbox a happy place again! We will have some offers on this shortly.
5. From our point of view we have put in some additional procedures to deal with the problem when it happens again, as it surely will!