Due to a heavier-than-normal influx of spam, our mail servers were queuing up legitimate email longer than average. To help clear the backlog of emails, we've loosened our anti-spam filters for the time being. Once the backlog has been cleared, we will return the spam filtering back to the previous level.

Unfortunately, this means that you may receive more spam in your inbox than normal, and for that we apologize. We are looking at increasing our mail server's capacity to help prevent this in the future.

We've noticed a dramatic increase in EBay (and PayPal) phishing scams. The most popular appears to be EBay emailing a user about an 'unpaid item' dispute.

We advise you to ignore these emails and are currently working to tag these as spam. If you are an EBay user and are concerned about an unpaid item dispute, log into your account, but do not click the link in the email to do so! Open your web browser, go to ebay's URL directly and log into your account. EBay will notify you through your alerts settings that you have a dispute.

One sure-fire way to tell if an email is a scam is by hovering your mouse pointer over the link (but do not click the link!). You will almost always see a non-ebay domain name, but crafted in such a way to try to fool you into thinking it's legitimate. Example: www.unpaid-items-ebay.com. EBay, and other 'majors' like PayPal, will always only use their own domain name in correspondance, such as www.ebay.com or www.paypal.com.

Recently we've noticed an increase in two new email-based threats. One email arrives with the subject line 'You have received a postcard from a family member' (or variant). Within this email is a link to a malicious website. If a user clicks on this link, there is a high-possibility that their computer will be infected.

Another threat is arriving in a form of a PDF attached to an email message. The subject line varies. This is a maliciously-crafted program designed to look like a PDF file, that may infect the user's computer when opened.

As always, do not open attachments or visit websites that are sent unsolicited to your email account. Please verify with the sender (if you know them) that they actually sent you the email message, otherwise delete it without opening it.

Please also keep your computer updated with the latest updates, and run a well-known mainstream anti-virus and anti-adware program.

Shaw Cable has recently started rolling out port 25 blocking in an effort to combat spam.

If you are currently using our mail servers for your outbound mail service (sending emails) and are a Shaw Cable customer, you may lose the ability to send emails.

To prevent this, either change your outbound mail server settings in your email program to use shawmail as the outbound server name, or change the outbound server port to 2525 if you wish to continue using our mail servers.

Several of our core servers received upgraded CPUs and RAM late last night. While down-time was kept at a minimum, some services may have been affected such as email, which would have been queued for delivery.

There should be a noticible increase in performance for services such as email, web hosting and database access.

We are currently experiencing another heavy load on our mail servers and are working to clear up the backlog of queued emails.

Update: The backlog has been cleared, but unfortunately we had to turn off our spam filtering to get the mail delivered. We apologize for the excess of spam that has most likely been delivered to your inbox and the spam filtering is back on.

A great article in CIO magazine about 'cluing in' upper management as to what sysadmins go through fighting spam.

http://www.cio.com

The building that our servers are located in is undergoing a power systems upgrade to increase power capacity.

We are not anticipating any power outages but there is an increased chance of an unscheduled power outage in the event work crews run into any unforseen contingencies.

The work is being done on the following days and times:

• February 20th - 1500-1530 PST
• February 21st - 1500-1530 PST
• February 22nd - 1500-1530 PST
• February 24th Stage I - 2000 - 2030 PST
• February 24th Stage II (Completion) - 2300 - 0700 PST

A new name server (DNS) has been deployed to replace our tired old secondary name server. The new name server information is:

NS2.GROOVY-WEB.COM / 64.40.113.113

Our primary name server still remains as:

NS1.GROOVY-WEB.COM / 64.40.101.220

Please note that on Feb 1, Disk Quotas will be going into effect. If your hosted website plus your mail folders exceed the file size quotas for your account, you will not be able to add any new files to your website. You also may not be able to receive any new emails until you have brought your website under its file size limits.

For more information, please don't hesitate to contact us.

Beginning Febrary 1st, 2007, a new process will run on our mail servers that will remove stale messages from email accounts. Only messages that are older than 2 months in your Sent and Trash folders will be affected. If you wish to retain your messages in these folders longer than 2 months, please archive them to your local computer.

Note: This only applies to clients using IMAP and GWS's webmail system. If you are using POP, this will not affect you.

The congestion with our mail servers has cleared up. A new mail server has been deployed to allow faster handling of the flood of recent spam. Delivery times should be down to seconds now.

We thank you for your patience!