Monthly Archives: November 2009

Notice of Emergency Downtime for wizmail.org

Posted by on November 28, 2009 Comments Off on Notice of Emergency Downtime for wizmail.org

We will be taking the machine hosting the main wizmail.org email service down tomorrow afternoon (Sunday 29th Nov).

This is to allow us to replace a failed disk and perform preventative maintenance on the server.

We expect the downtime to commence sometime around 15:00 and last for a couple of hours. The outage may be shorter as part of the work has already been performed on the replacement disks.

During this time it will not be possible to send or receive email, though any inbound email will be queued on the alternate inbound server during the outage and will be delivered to your inboxes as soon as the main server is back.

Notice of Emergency Downtime for post.wizards.co.uk

Posted by on November 28, 2009 Comments Off on Notice of Emergency Downtime for post.wizards.co.uk

We will be taking the machine hosting the post.wizards.co.uk outbound email service down tomorrow afternoon (Sunday 29th Nov).

This is to allow us to replace a failed disk and perform preventative maintenance on the server.

We expect the downtime to commence sometime around 15:00 and last for a couple of hours. The outage may be shorter as part of the work has already been performed on the replacement disks.

During the outage it will not be possible to send email if you are configured to use post.wizards.co.uk as your outbound SMTP server.  As an alternative you could configure your outbound to use post.tidymail.co.uk, but you must also have a client that can authenticate when it sends. Details of configuring common clients along with technical details for other clients can be found on our Configuring Your Client For Tidymail page.

Server Reboots – 2009-11-22

Posted by on November 15, 2009 Comments Off on Server Reboots – 2009-11-22

Just to let you know that next Sunday, 22nd November during the afternoon we will be rebooting the machines that handle email.

This will allow us to boot with an updated kernel which has a number of security fixes we regard as needed.

The outage should last less than 10 minutes for each machine, and we will only reboot one machine at a time to ensure that incoming email is not blocked. Doing this means no inbound email will be lost, only that for the duration of the reboot your will not be able to collect email.

WARNING – Phishing attempts

Posted by on November 11, 2009 Comments Off on WARNING – Phishing attempts

We have noted that some of our customers are receiving email purporting to be from ourselves claiming they are over their storage limit and that they need to reply with their account details including password to resolve the storage issue.

These emails are not from us and should be deleted.

We will not ask for your email passwords, ever.

Subject: Your mailbox has exceeded the storage limit.
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:43:42 -0800
From: ServiceHelp Desk <admin@webmail.org>
Reply-To: adminwebct@tmail.tv
To: undisclosed-recipients:;

Dear Webmail Account User,

This message was sent automatically by a program on Webmail admin center
which periodically checks the size of inbox, The program is run
automatically to ensure no user inbox grows too large. If your inbox
becomes too large, you will be unable to receive new emails. Just before
this message was sent, you are currently running on 20.9 GB, You have has
exceeded the storage limit which is 20GB.

To help us re-set your Account SPACE on our database prior to maintain
your INBOX, you must reply to this e-mail providing us your the Below
information:

E-mail ( ... ...... ...  ... ... ... ...  ... ... ... ...  ... ... ... ... )
Username/ID ( .all.. ... ... ... ... ...  )
Current Password ( ... ...... ... ) Retype Password: ( ... ...... ... )

From this point you will be unable to receive new email as it will be
returned to the sender, Provide the above information to enable us help
reset your webmail immediately.

NOTE: Your Webmail Account Expire in Three (3) Days. After you read this
message, it is best to REPLY with the required information to upgrade
MailBox. Reply to this message immediately to Re activate your Account.

Thank you for your cooperation.
Webmail Help Desk. System Administrator
-------------------------------------------------

Refinements to URL scanning

Posted by on November 8, 2009 Comments Off on Refinements to URL scanning

We made a few adjustments to the URL scanning code in the past couple of weeks to allow it to be more effective as the spammers mutate to avoid earlier block techniques.

  • We added a number of handlers to spot redirectors.
  • We’ve adjusted the list of tell-tales that accompany trojan executables
  • Improved spotting of Image-Only spam.
  • Greater range of countries and formats for telephone numbers.

We’ve got a few more steps before we can administer the spammed telephone numbers via our management interface but for the time being we’ve added a selection of the more egregious examples to the database manually.

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