For a long time, our mail system has blocked many malicious filename extensions.
Recently, we’ve seen an increase in “.js” files that spread various forms of malware. These change their “patterns” often enough that they’re sometimes not detected by virus scanners.
Legitimate “.js” files are common in e-mail, so it’s impossible to block them outright. (They’re often sent as part of a package of website files — for example, a zipped copy of the WordPress files contains them.)
However, legitimate “.js” files almost always occur as part of an archive containing other files. They almost never occur alone, as they do in the malware versions.
Because of that, our e-mail system now blocks “.zip” files that contain only a single “.js” file, on the assumption that they’re almost certainly malicious.
We don’t expect this to cause any problems, but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or trouble.
Recently, we’ve had quite a few customers write in to complain that their copy of Outlook 2016 is behaving incorrectly: it is either deleting messages from the server when it is not supposed to do so, or it is downloading duplicate copies of mail from the server. This happens for POP accounts, not for IMAP accounts (which is what we normally recommend customers to use).
These problems happen because of a bug in Outlook 2016. Microsoft has a Web page that explains the problem as well as the solution (upgrade Outlook).
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.0.4, 5.6.19 and 5.5.33 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.0, 5.6 and 5.5 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but in the unlikely event you experience any trouble, don’t hesitate to contact us.
We’ve updated the SSL/TLS security settings on our mail servers to match current “best practices” for security.
Our customers shouldn’t notice any changes. We’re just mentioning this so that people know to contact us in the unlikely event they do have any trouble.
That said, if you do have any trouble, it’s probably because you’re using outdated, insecure mail software that you should update. If you can’t update it, but the changes prevent you from sending mail with the “SSL” option turned on in your program, you may need to turn off the “SSL” option for outgoing mail until you can update.
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The MySQL database software on the “web14” server started becoming intermittently unstable at 4:29 PM (Pacific time). Web sites that use a database (such as WordPress sites) may have experienced problems until the problem was fixed at 5:03 PM.
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Our business offices will be closed on Monday, February 15 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.
The PHP developers recently released versions 7.0.3, 5.6.18 and 5.5.32 that fix several bugs. We’ve upgraded the PHP 7.0, 5.6 and 5.5 series on our servers as a result.
These changes should not be noticeable, but in the unlikely event you experience any trouble, don’t hesitate to contact us.
In addition, we’ve added a “patch” to PHP on our systems that will help avoid an issue that can cause WordPress sites to stop working when using poorly-written plugins or themes.
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Between 9:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Friday February 5, 2016, the MySQL database software on each of our servers will be upgraded from version 5.5.46 to 5.5.47. This will cause an approximately 60 second interruption of service on each MySQL-using customer Web site at some point during this period.
This upgrade is necessary for security reasons. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.
Update 11:04 PM Pacific time: The maintenance was completed as planned and all services are running normally.
Between 2:32 and 2:37 PM Pacific time today (January 27, 2016), one of our network providers that handles a substantial portion of our network traffic had a failure.
For some (but not all) visitors, sites and e-mail we host were unreachable during that period. The problem was resolved by routing data around that network provider.
We’ve been told that the network provider experienced a hardware failure in a core router. They are investigating the issue and intend to resolve it.
We apologize to our customers affected by this problem.
We’ve updated the AWStats software we use to generate website statistics. The statistics beginning January 1, 2016 use the latest version 7.4.
This version has support for newer browsers, operating systems, and search engines, and is somewhat better at identifying and filtering out traffic from non-human visitors. This may mean your statistics show a slight reduction in human visitors (and a slight increase in non-human visitors, shown as “Not viewed traffic”) starting January 1, 2016, particularly on sites that aren’t very busy.
We should probably mention that if you’re relying on AWStats for information about the behavior of human visitors, you can usually get more accurate statistics using Google Analytics, which works in a different way than simply analyzing log data after the fact. We have a page explaining more about the difference between AWStats and Google Analytics.
