ChurchAssist News

Our service was down today from 11:23 AM to 12:50 PM EDT. There was an issue with a power tap at the NOC where our server is located, which in turn fried a network switch.

MailScanner was installed this morning. You should see an icon for it in your hosting control panel. MailScanner incorporates SpamAssassin, so you will no longer see a link for that in the Mail section.

Those of you who have been using SpamAssassin will need to configure MailScanner to tell it how to handle your spam. You can now specify separate actions for each domain (if you have multiple domains) as well as two levels of SpamAssassin scores (and you can configure what those levels are). You can also whitelist (or blacklist) specific addresses or domains.

Recently, we’ve had a number of customers unknowingly use up all their allocated disk space. Usually what tips folks off to this is that they stop receiving e-mail. More times than not, the disk space is used up by spam e-mail that has accumulated in one or more mailboxes.

Each hosting account has what is known as a Default Address. This is where all e-mail ends up that is sent to an address on your domain that is not defined by a POP3 mailbox or an alias (forwarder). By default, this is set to your main account mailbox (defined by your username). Over time, this mailbox can fill up and potentially use all of your allocated disk space, which can prevent ANY e-mail from reaching your account.

How does this happen? One way is through what are known as ‘dictionary attacks.’ Spammers will often send messages to many names at your domain hoping that some will be legitimate e-mail addresses. All the ones that fail will end up in your Default Address mailbox. This mailbox may also contain ‘bounce’ messages, which are e-mails sent back to you when an e-mail from your domain can’t reach it’s intended recipient. Often times, this is also the result of spammers forging the ‘From’ address of their messages using an address at your domain.

Our recommendation is that you change your Default Address. To do this, click on the Mail applet in your hosting control panel, then click on Default Address. The recommendation given by CPanel here is incorrect. We recommend that you use ‘:fail:’ and not ‘:blackhole:’ (include the colons but not the quotes). When you set the Default Address to ‘:fail:’, mail sent to a non-existent address is rejected when another mail server tries to deliver it to our mail server. A bounce message is no longer sent to the sender, which in the past could have been used to indicate what addresses were legitimate.

By the way, some of you are using your account mailbox as a regular e-mail account. We do not recommend that you do this, and in fact, the above recommendation will prevent you from doing this. If you need to use your username as an e-mail address, create a POP3 mailbox with the same name.

As usual, if you have any questions or problems with this, please submit a ticket on our help desk.

The mailbox storage upgrade has been completed, but the installation of MailScanner has not. In order to ensure that things go smoothly, this has been contracted out to a third-party installer, and we are still waiting for them to reach us in their queue.