Domain Registry Support - Phishing Scam – May 27, 2008
Watch out for calls or e-mails from companies claiming to verify your information. I got a call today regarding one of our customer's domains, trying to get information to "verify" the ownership. Presumably they are trying to take over ownership of the domain. An easy question to ask them is if they are the current registrar for the domain. (Of course they could lie about that, but Domain Registry Support is honest enough to ignore the question and just keep restating who they are, rather than saying "No, we have no reason to be calling you".
DomainsMadeEasy, the company we often use for registering domains, does email once a year (according to ICANN policy, though most companies don't seem to follow that policy). Unfortunately, the email does look very similar to the phishing scam emails (I guess the phishers do a good job of imitating the real thing). They will not ask for any money or any other information, because they already have it, and you just have to verify that it is correct.
Thank You! To Our Customers – May 26, 2008
PHP4 to PHP5 upgrade – May 26, 2008
PHP4 support was discontinued by the authors as of January, 2008. Lime Daley will be moving everyone to PHP5 this Friday, May 30. We will go through each site to try to make sure it is still working, but depending on what PHP applications you are using, particularly if you wrote it yourself, there might be issues in migrating. There are two temporary solutions that you can use if your code doesn't work in PHP5.
- Rename the affected files with a .php4 extension.
- Add a bit of code to your .htaccess file:
ForceType application/x-httpd-php4
Remember that this is only a temporary measure, as PHP4 does not receive ongoing security updates and bug fixes, and it will be supported less and less as time goes on.
Spam Statistics – May 19, 2008
Statistics update for all of Lime Daley's servers. It is always amazing to me to see how much spam is sent by known spammers, and is trivially easy to throw away. I just checked the current stats, and Lime Daley is on target to reject 2 million spams this year. That doesn't include spams that are more questionable (122 thousand), and will be passed onto the user's spam folders for them to verify that they are spam.
It would be nice to lower the "questionable" emails further, but it is hard to do that and maintain a 0% false positive (where real email is considered spam). I consider real emails that don't get delivered, and worse, don't even get reported to either the sender or the receiver) as completely unacceptable, and so have to put up with the questionable spams being put in a spam folder.
On the other hand, since there are around a thousand email accounts on the servers, that means each person get an average of 122 "questionable" emails in their spam folder each year, which doesn't seem that much of a burden, particularly since lots of people (on competitors' servers) put up with a much higher number than that.
Easier User Administration, Webmail, etc. – May 16, 2008
Lime Daley now supports SSL for all email connections for all customers, if they use their assigned domain name for accessing our servers. Contact the support department for details, but generally, the appropriate name is <your-domain-name>-mail.limedaley.com. This hostname can be used for SSL (and non-SSL, though we recommend SSL for security; TLS is also available) connections for SMTP, POP, IMAP as well as webmail and configuration by going to https://<your-domain-name>-mail.limedaley.com.
A wild-card SSL certificate makes this all possible, and avoids the warning messages typical at other providers when using self-signed certificates.