Documentation

Data Center Power Failure

06/13/2024 1:49am – We have experienced a power failure at our data center and our generator system did not power up automatically as expected. This allowed some of our systems to use up the available battery capacity and crash. We are currently in the process of running file system checks for our storage systems and restoring services. We will update once all services have been restored. If you have any issues or questions please submit them to us at support@internetpro.net.

06/13/2024 3:20am – All of services have been restored and we will be investigating further into why our backup power failed. If you have any issues please send them to us at support@internetpro.net.

Affected systems include: VPS, hosted phone systems including our corporate system, some web services, DNS services, mail, and backups.

06/14/2024 3:00pm – The fault with our emergency backup generator has been located and repaired.

revans2024-06-14T15:19:56-05:00June 13, 2024|Documentation, News and Updates|Comments Off

Webform Recommendations

As spam becomes more and more of a problem, spammers and scammers are utilizing web page contact forms more and more to launch their spam and campaigns. We have been forced to implement strict policies when it comes to websites and their ability to send out emails. Our official recommendation is not to use contact forms in the first place. We recommend placing your contact email as a non-clickable link (no mailto:) on the page so people can copy/paste it into their email client.

However, if a form is necessary for your site functionality needs, there are some things to know. First, it is much easier to receive these notifications if we also handle email for your domain. If you use another provider for email, such as Microsoft 365 or Google, getting those emails to you is more of a challenge. If your email is hosted with us, you can use the instructions found on this page: https://www.netsolinc.com/web-form-authentication/

If your email is with another provider, you’ll need to do some work with your admin console to setup the proper authentication so that the website can use your email provider to send the email. There are some good plugins for WordPress to do this and other website content management systems (CMS) also have the ability to varying degrees. We recommend FluentSMTP for WordPress as it handles all the major providers including Microsoft 365 for free. Most of the other plugins require a subscription to handle Microsoft 365.

Keep in mind that the sending email address (the FROM) and the authenticating email address must match. This is important if you use an email such as info@yourdomain.com and it is a list instead of a mailbox. If this is the case, you’ll have to change the FROM or you’ll need to make the info@ an actual mailbox so that it can send email.

Our tech support team is available to help you with setup, so please reach out to us at support@internetpro.net if you run into trouble.

tnolen2024-03-13T16:09:47-05:00March 13, 2024|Documentation, FAQ|Comments Off

New Remote Email Forward Policy

February 6, 2024 – Beginning today, we will be ending the ability to do “remote forwards” on email accounts. A remote forward is setup to take an email address which is local to our servers and forward it to another service. For example, if we forwarded support@internetpro.net (which is located on our servers) to someone@yahoo.com, that would be a “remote forward”. The problem with this is that when Yahoo! sees the email, they think it is being sent by our servers. So, if a spammer sends an email to support@internetpro.net and we forward it to Yahoo!, then Yahoo! thinks we are spamming them.

This month, Google has put much more strict policies in place dealing with spam and as a result, emails coming through our systems are being rejected or flagged as spam by Google’s servers. This is due to the number of remote forwards we have in place, and so we’ve had to make the decision to stop these forwards and institute a policy of not allowing them in the future.

Since Google has implemented this, the rest of the industry who haven’t already done so will quickly line up to do so as well.

Some more information about remote forwards follows for the technically curious:

Why remote forwards are bad

With the anti-spam protections in place in all modern mail servers, forwarding emails to remote servers or addresses is not recommended. The whole industry is moving away from remote forwards. As Best Practices for email server operators, remote forwarding should be disabled due to the potentially system-wide negative effects they could cause, such as backscatter and IP reputation issues.

Backscatter can stem from the remote addresses being no longer valid, servers not being authorized to send emails for the sender’s domain, or emails being rejected by remote servers due to anti-spam policies in place at the remote site.

As more backscatter events accumulate, they will not only cause higher system load and resource usage, but will also have a negative effect on the IP reputation of the sending servers. A poor IP reputation will cause system-wide delivery issues affecting accounts on those servers. For example, if our server’s IPs are blocked or rate-limited by Yahoo! or Gmail servers, all accounts will experience delivery issues when sending emails to Yahoo! and Gmail addresses. (This is happening now. See: https://www.netsolinc.com/gmail-blocking-email/)

Aside from the backscatter and IP reputation issues, having remote forwarding available provides a way for bad actors secretly forwarding a compromised account’s emails to a remote address without the account/mailbox owner’s knowledge. For example, if third-party site’s account verification or password-reset emails are being forwarded to a remote address, the bad actor could gain access to the compromised user’s other online accounts.

tnolen2024-02-06T17:30:54-06:00February 6, 2024|Documentation, FAQ, News and Updates|Comments Off

Gmail Requiring SPF Records

We are getting more and more support requests from people having trouble sending email to Gmail and Google hosted domains. This is currently almost always the result of an email domain not having an SPF record. That is a fairly technical sentence, so click the link for detailed information on SPF. The simplified version is that an SPF record specifies what servers are allowed to send email for your email address. It was designed to help combat spam. If you don’t have one of those records, Google is now rejecting the email with an error message similar to the one below:

–BEGIN

host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[74.125.195.26] said:
   550-5.7.26 The MAIL FROM domain [<your domain>] has an SPF record
   with 550-5.7.26 a hard fail policy (-all) but it fails to pass SPF checks
   with the 550-5.7.26 ip: [17.57.156.17]. To best protect our users from spam
   and 550-5.7.26 phishing, the message has been blocked. Please visit
   550-5.7.26 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication for
   more 550 5.7.26 information.

–END

In the past, Google would just send the offending message to the Spam folder, but now if the SPF record is missing or fails (as the one above), the message will be rejected.

This can also be caused by “forwards”. For instance, if you have an email address hosted with us, but choose to forward incoming email to a personal Gmail account, you will most likely lose some email as a result of this policy. Senders trying to reach you will receive a failure notice, but there is no way to “fix” this except to check your email in the account rather than forwarding it to another external email address.

tnolen2022-09-20T11:01:02-05:00September 20, 2022|Documentation, News and Updates|Comments Off

New Mail Server Feature!

October 20, 2015 – We’re very happy to announce the addition of a new mail server feature – Server Side Mail Rules. This is a feature we actually had on our old mail system and we have been missing it since then, so it is great to have it back! This feature is most useful to customers who are using Webmail or IMAP for their email. The interface is available in the Tuxedo webmail. Access it by choosing the Settings icon on the left and then choosing “Delivery Filters” in the section above the icons. The interface is very similar to what you would find in most email client programs, but if you need assistance, please feel free to call us at 256-547-6817 or email support@internetpro.net.

To use these filters, you don’t have to remain in the Tuxedo interface. Once you have saved your rule, it will remain active all the time, so the filter will still be functioning when accessing your email through your email client like Thunderbird, Outlook, or your mobile device as long as it is using the IMAP protocol.

tnolen2015-10-20T23:29:50-05:00October 20, 2015|Documentation, News and Updates|Comments Off

Web Form Authentication (Updated)

Why won’t the form on my website send email?

Beginning January 1, 2015, Network Solutions, Inc. requires SMTP authentication for all form on websites. This it to prevent spammers from exploiting web forms (like contact forms, applications, and such) to send out unsolicited email. By using SMTP authentication, we are able to limit the number of emails a form can generate, and if one becomes exploited, we are able to stop just that form and not block an entire web server.

Most (if not all) modern email libraries support SMTP authentication. For example, in WordPress, we recommend the “FluentSMTP” plugin. Other Content Management Systems will have similar plugins and even standalone form handlers should support this protocol. If you are a web designer and are having trouble finding a suitable library for delivering email, please contact us at support@internetpro.net.

If we host your email, we recommend using the email account which will be receiving the webform information. The FROM on your forms MUST be the same as the email address you use for authentication. If we do not host your email, please take a look at this article.

If you want your form to send email out as webform@yourdomain.com, then create an alias with that address on the account who will be monitoring the email.

Settings for the email library:

Use SMTP-Auth
Authentication type: Plain or Login
Security: TLS
SMTP server: smtp.internetpro.net
Port: 587
Username: entire email address (in our example, webform@yourdomain.com)
Password: Your configured password (minimum 5 characters with 1 number and 1 letter)

Update February 26, 2024 – The Username used for authentication *MUST* match the FROM EMAIL address now. This is because of new policies by other providers to help prevent spam. Please update your email authentication plugins. Our staff will be updating sites we have access to.

tnolen2024-03-19T11:04:36-05:00December 17, 2014|Documentation, FAQ|Comments Off

Whitelisting Emails in Mail Settings

This documentation only applies if you are using the Normal with Quarantine template for spam filtering. If you are using other templates, your spam messages will not be quarantined in the spam folder.
To add quarantined senders to your whitelist follow these steps (the numbers on the arrow correspond to the step number):

Click on Spam Management – it will expand as shown in the screenshot below after you click it.
Click Quarantined Mail
Put a check mark next to the message(s) which are legitimate mail you want to receive
Click the “Deliver selected messages normally” button. The sender of the email(s) will be added to your personal whitelist, so that sender’s email will never be quarantined or blocked as spam again!

Mail-Settings

nwebb2014-12-11T20:29:17-06:00December 11, 2014|Documentation|Comments Off

Signatures in Tuxedo Webmail

When using webmail, you may want to have a signature automatically append to your messages. These are the instructions for accessing/managing signatures in the Tuxedo Webmail,

To access your signature and set or change it follow these steps as shown in the screenshot below:
	1 - click on Settings on the bottom left
	2 - click on Identities at the top center of the screen.
	3 - click on your email address on the top left

To set when your signature is used, follow these steps as shown in the screenshot below:
	1 - click on Settings on the bottom left
	2 - click on Composing Messages
	3 - set when you want your signature to be used

tnolen2014-12-11T17:33:35-06:00December 11, 2014|Documentation|Comments Off

Whitelisting Emails in Webmail Lite

This documentation only applies if you are using the Normal with Quarantine template for spam filtering. If you are using other templates, your spam messages will not be quarantined in the spam folder.
To add quarantined senders to your whitelist in Webmail Lite follow these steps:

1) First, click the spam folder to show a list of messages which have been quarantined as spam.

legitimate-webmail

2) Click the legitimate email to view it. Above the body of the email, you will see an “Allow Sender” button as in the screenshot below. Click that button.

legitimate-webmail2

That’s it! The email will automatically be moved from the spam folder and back to your Inbox. The sender of the email will be added to your personal whitelist, so that sender’s email will never be quarantined or blocked as spam again!

nwebb2014-12-11T19:56:51-06:00December 11, 2014|Documentation|Comments Off

Whitelisting Emails in Tuxedo

This documentation only applies if you are using the Normal with Quarantine template for spam filtering. If you are using other templates, your spam messages will not be quarantined in the spam folder.
To add quarantined senders to your whitelist using the Tuxedo webmail, follow these steps:

1) First, click the spam folder to show a list of messages which have been quarantined as spam.

legitimate

2) Click the legitimate email to view it. Above the body of the email, you will see an “Allow Sender” tab as in the screenshot below. Click that link.

legitimate2

That’s it! The email will automatically be moved from the spam folder and back to your Inbox. The sender of the email will be added to your personal whitelist, so that sender’s email will never be quarantined or blocked as spam again!

nwebb2014-12-11T19:57:41-06:00December 11, 2014|Documentation|Comments Off