April 7, 2008 - We had an issue with the mail server today at about 2:30. Some internetpro.net email accounts were affected. We restored from backup, so some users may receive a few emails that they have received in the last day again. Otherwise, everything should be back to normal now.

March 12, 2008 - We have implemented stricter restrictions regarding email using the sender policy framework (SPF). This is to help eliminate more spam and also keeps spammers from sending email using other people's domain names. Another benefit is that it will help keep email coming from our users out of the junk or spam folder of ISPs that recognize SPF (such as Hotmail or Google). If you get an error message when sending email that mentions SPF, please contact our support staff. For more information on SPF, click here.

March 11, 2008 - Network Solutions, Inc. is going to be transferring ownership of the gadsden.com domain. This will affect customers using that domain for their email and therefore, those email addresses will need to be changed. We will be transferring those email accounts to the internetpro.net domain. For example, if you have an email address that is user@gadsden.com, the new email address will be user@internetpro.net. You will keep all of your address book contacts, folders, and saved email. The gadsden.com domain will remain functional through March 31st. to give you time to transition your contacts to the new address. If you use webmail, you can just start logging into the system with your new email address right away. If you use an email program (such as Outlook Express, Thunderbird, or other program) a few changes will need to be made in the program to make the transition. If you need help with those settings, please call us at 256-547-6817 or 877-886-6868 to have a technician step you through the changes.

February 28, 2008 - Google's "captcha" system was hacked a couple of days ago. The captcha system is what they use to keep spammers from using automated scripts or "bots" to send massive amounts of spam through the Gmail system. As a result, their servers have been blacklisted by one of the anti-spam services we use. This has caused some of our users to have trouble receiving email from gmail.com addresses and other domains that use the Gmail system. Since Gmail is a very large system and many domains are subcontracted through them, we have elected to remove the blacklist which is blocking them from our system until they are able to deal with the problem. This may result in some additional spam, but will allow users of the Gmail system to email our users. We will monitor the situation and re-enable the blacklist when Google's system is removed. Click here to read an article about the issue.

December 12, 2007 - We had a major outage today from approx. 1:15pm to 3:45pm. The outage affected all services. We are working to understand and prevent the problem in the future. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue casused.

November 3, 2007 - As part of an ongoing infrastructure change that we are making, we updated the mail server to use a different IP address. Our dialup access is set to filter outgoing email except to our mail server to help reduce spam and the spread of viruses. This filter did not get updated when we made the change and as a result, some dialup customers could not send email. We have updated the filters now, and any dialup customers that are still having trouble should disconnect and reconnect to apply the new settings. After that, email should work fine.

October 23, 2007 - Our home page and a few other sites were inaccessible for about 5 minutes this evening. One of our webservers lost a hard drive, but our expert staff got it replaced and everything back up and running with a minimum of downtime.

August 24,2007 - Today we implemented an additional "blacklist" to our tests for spam. This test may cause some customers to have trouble sending email through our servers. If you get an error regarding http://www.sorbs.net then this test is blocking you. To get around the issue, you need to set your email client to use port 587 instead of port 25 and your outgoing mail server will require authentication using the same username/password as your incoming server. If you need help making this change in your email client, please call our support line at 256-547-6817 or 877-886-6868 and our technicians will be happy to step you through the settings. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but this blacklist will eliminate more spam, so we think the one-time settings change that some people may have to make will be worth it.

June 11, 2007 - Another bad update for our virus software caused an issue similar to the one on June 2. Customers may have noticed and increase in spam delivery between 6:30pm and 9:30pm. The issue was corrected at 9:30pm when a new update was available and applied.

June 2, 2007 - An update of our virus scanning software caused some issues with the mail server this morning. Users may have experienced disconnections from the mail server when trying to send or receive while we were addressing the problem. Additionally, if the receiving mail process was interrupted, the user may receive duplicate copies of some messages. These problems have been rectified.

May 1, 2007 - Our news server now requires authentication. The username and password will be the same as you dial up with, except that the username will have @internetpro.net added to it. 

Example:
Dial Up:
Username: johndoe
Password: blahblah

Newsgroup Authentication:
Username: johndoe@intenetpro.net
Password: blahblah

If you need help configuring your news reader, or if you are still having trouble, please call our office at 256-547-6817.

The last issue that has been caused by the changes we have made relates to outgoing email.  We are now blocking all outgoing email traffic to any server but ours.  If you have an email account that is configured to use some other outgoing email server, you will need to change it to smtp.internetpro.net.  If you are not checking an email account on our server, you will need to call us at the office (256-547-6817) to get a username/password for access to send email.  This change was made to help reduce spam and prevent the spread of worms/viruses.

On May 1st, 2007, we made a sweeping change to our dial up access system.  This change will add several features to our dial up services.  One benefit is that we can now offer local dial up numbers in other cities for you to use when you are on the road.  Another benefit is V.92 technology that is now supported.   Of course, with any big change, there are always some issues.   One change is that we are now blocking outgoing email except to our mail servers.  This is basically to reduce SPAM that is being spread by virus-infected computers.  Another issue affects newsgroups.  Our news server is temporarily inaccessible while this change is taking place.  It should come back online in about 24 hours.  We are also removing our adblocking service for dialup due to lack of demand.  There are many free services online that do the same thing, so we are doing away with it. 

On Monday, Feb. 26th, we upgraded our virus scanning to better detect "phishing" attempts in email.  If you are not familiar with phishing, you can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing.    We are now treating known phishing attempts as viruses and are deleting them before they are delivered to you.  Even so, if you are not familiar with phishing, we recommend that you visit the link above to familiarize yourself with the concept so you can better protect yourself if you come across one of these emails.

There is some belated news to pass along.  We did a major overhaul of our spam filtering system.  In the past, we have always had the philosophy that we would just tag "spam" email and leave it to the client to filter and/or delete the messages.  This prevents us from accidentally deleting a good email or "false positives" - email that we think is spam, but is not actually spam.  Now, due to the volume of spam, we have had repeated requests to reduce the amount of junk email coming in.  Therefore, we have instituted a new policy on deleting spam.  Our spam system is point-based, with 5.0 points being necessary to be tagged with ******SPAM***** in the subject line.  With the new system in place, email that gets over 20.5 points automatically gets deleted.  This gives us a good buffer for messages that "might be" spam while allowing us to reduce the volume of mail delivered by as much as 90%.

Also part of the upgrades is the fact that when a message is tagged, you will get an attachment with the original, unaltered email in it.  The main message will give a report as to WHY the message was tagged.   This way, if you are getting false positives, we can use this report to further "train" our mail filters.

For more information regarding our spam filtering and how you can automatically delete messages before you get them see http://www.internetpro.net/filtering.php.

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