C O V I S P . N E T

Updated some packages:

• perl-threaded-5.10.0_3
• php-5.2.9

The mail server was offline for approximately 2 hours today. It is up now and all services are running.

Changing your email password on a regular basis is a good idea, as is picking a good password.  Passwords should be at least 8 characters long, and longer is better (admin@covisp.net’s password is 23 characters!).  They should contain a mix of upper and lower case letters and some numbers and some other characters that are not numbers or letters as well.  You can go with a short random password (we have a password generator) but those can be hard for most people to remember, so another way is to think of a phrase or saying that means something to you, make some substitutions, and use that.

For example, a friend of mine uses his wedding anniversary, which is July 14, 1989, but he types it in as “JuL-14,198nine”; still perfectly recognizable and memorable, but very very hard to guess. Or maybe you are a fan of John F Kennedy and your password is “A!wyccdfy,awycdfyc” (Ask not what your country… etc).

One thing to be careful of is using your passwords in your webmail if you do not have a secure method of storing them.  You should enable a ‘master password’ if you use Firefox and have it remember your passwords.  If you are in OS X, then the keychain is secure, but know that anyone who has your login password will be able to access your keychain as well. We recommend that Mac customers set their keychain password to a different password than their login password and that Windows users use Firefox with a master password that is not the same as your account or login password. If you are the type of person that tends to use one password for everything, consider getting a password manager that will let you easily keep track of unique passwords. You never want to recycle a password.

Remember, having a weak password could cause you a lot of embarrassment, or worse, a lot of money.  You want your email to be safe from prying eyes: you’d lock up important documents, so lock up your important email too.

To change your password, click on the “User Email” link on the right and login with your current email user name and password.

The link to the email help in the right Links section now works correctly.

Covisp.net home page is now a blog format page, making updates more obvious and allowing RSS  subscriptions. Links to help pages are in the right column.

There are no longer any unsecured-IMAP accounts available. All users must use SSL to access their email.

There is now a single WebMail for all users. Be sure and put your username in correctly (either user@doamin.tld or user, depending on your account).

Some non-secure email accounts received duplicate messages for several hours. This problem has been fixed.

There is a new backup system that will preserve all emails for 14 days. If you accidently lose an email, the backup should have it. This backup is run before the messages is delivered, so it should always have all email up to 14 days old. Backups started 5 Feb 2009. If you need an email recovered we simply need the email address it was to, from, and the approximate date. This recovery is completely free for up to 5 emails a month.

Some new anti-spam measures in place today should help eliminate a good chunk of spam messages that were getting through the greylist and RBLs. Remember, if you’re using a secure email account, check your SPAM folder for any false positives. As always, no email that is accepted will ever be automatically deleted by the server. We will MANUALLY clear SPAM folders if the contents in them are over 30 days.