Labor Day 2018 holiday hours

Our business offices will be closed on Monday, September 3 to observe the US Labor Day legal holiday. As always, we’ll provide same-day support for time-sensitive issues via our ticket and e-mail systems. However, questions that aren’t time-sensitive (including most billing matters) may not be answered until Tuesday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent issues.

PHP 7.1.21 and 7.2.9

The PHP developers recently released versions 7.1.21 and 7.2.9 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.1 and 7.2 series on our servers as a result.

These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.

phpMyAdmin updated to version 4.8.3

We’ve updated phpMyAdmin to the latest version, 4.8.3.

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Manual spam “reject list” matching improved

We’ve improved how our “My Account” control panel rejection of email addresses works.

Previously, if you added an e-mail address to the reject list, the “Return-Path” (aka bounce address) header of each incoming message was checked for matches. This was sufficient for most messages, but some messages use a different address in the “Return-Path” header and the “From” address header, which could be confusing.

As of today, both headers (the “Return-Path” header and the “From” address header) are checked when matching reject list entries, making it more reliable.

As always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble or questions.

Mailman mailing list software upgraded to version 2.1.29

The authors of the Mailman mailing list software we provide for customers have recently released version 2.1.29 to fix several bugs.

We’ve upgraded the Mailman software on our servers as a result.

Users of Mailman lists shouldn’t notice any changes, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or see any problems.

PHP 5.6.37, 7.0.31, 7.1.20 and 7.2.8

The PHP developers recently released versions 5.6.37, 7.0.31, 7.1.20, and 7.2.8 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2 series on our servers as a result.

These changes should not be noticeable, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.

Brief scheduled maintenance on web11 server July 21, 2018 (completed)

At approximately 10:30 PM Pacific time on Saturday, July 21, 2018, the web11 server will be restarted.

This will cause a brief interruption of service (less than 5 minutes) for sites and email on this server. Sites on other servers will not be affected.

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Extortion scams that claim to have hacked your account

We’ve seen a few reports recently of customers receiving messages that begin something like this:

I’m going to cut to the chase. I am aware [redacted] is your pass word. More to the point, I know your secret and I’ve evidence of your secret. You don’t know me personally and no one paid me to examine you.

Or like this:

You may not know me and you are probably wondering why you are getting this e mail, right? I’m a hacker who cracked your email and devices a few months ago. Do not try to contact me or find me, it is impossible, since I sent you an email from YOUR hacked account.

The message then goes on to demand money (usually in the form of a Bitcoin ransom) in order to not reveal your “secret”.

These are a scam; you should ignore them. The mail is sent in bulk by spammers to millions of people, just like any other spam, and they know nothing about you beyond your email address and possibly a password they stole from another site. Our filters block most of these (we’re blocking more than a dozen per day per account, on average), but unfortunately no filter can block all spam messages, and the spammers are constantly changing them to get around the blocking.

You can find more information on sites like Sophos and Krebs on Security.

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4th of July 2018 holiday hours

Our business offices will be closed on Wednesday, July 4 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, we’ll provide same-day support for time-sensitive issues via our ticket and e-mail systems. However, questions that aren’t time-sensitive (including most billing matters) may not be answered until the next day, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.

HTTP/2 support for all sites (completed)

Update June 13, 2018: This is complete, and HTTP/2 is now used on all websites we host.

We’ve updated the Apache web server software we use from version 2.4.25 to 2.4.33, which allows us to add support for the newer HTTP/2 protocol.

HTTP/2 is enabled for our own tigertech.net sites and a small number of our customer sites now, and we’ll be gradually rolling out this feature to all sites over the next few weeks. (We’ll update this post when that’s completely finished.)

Customers should not see any problems or downtime. We’re mentioning it here just so that customers who do notice a change for some reason will know about it. As always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any trouble.

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