If you use the Gravity Forms WordPress plugin, be sure you don’t set it to send mail “from” the e-mail address of the person filling out the form. If you do, you’ll have trouble due to recent “DMARC” anti-forgery changes some companies (including AOL and Yahoo) have made.
To avoid problems, make sure that Gravity Forms (and other such forms) send mail “from” the Web site domain name the form uses. For instance, if your Web site is at www.example.com, you could send mail from “notifications@example.com”. Here’s a helpful page that explains how to properly set up the Gravity Forms address with DMARC in mind.
By the way, this is just a specific case of the general rule of “don’t send mail from addresses you don’t own”. The simple way to think of it is that you’re not (say) AOL or Yahoo, so your Web site shouldn’t send mail claiming it’s from aol.com or yahoo.com addresses. AOL and Yahoo don’t want other people doing that. Always send mail only from your own domain name.
Some customers using very old e-mail programs (such as Microsoft Entourage and Netscape Mail) have complained that their programs have started showing a warning that the “Certificate Authority Is Expired” or “Unable to establish a secure connection”. These old e-mail programs have certificates for common “root certificate authorities” built into them, with expiration dates that have now passed. There is no way to update the root certificates which are built into these old programs, unfortunately, so these e-mail programs will always complain that the root certificates are expired and thus no longer valid. This is not a problem with our e-mail servers, but instead is a problem with the old e-mail programs — they were never expected to be used this long.
If this is happening to you, there are three possible actions.
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Our business offices will be closed on Monday, February 17 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.
At approximately 2:45 PM Pacific time February 6, 2014, the Apache Web server running on the web13 server hung and needed to be manually restarted. We fixed the problem at 2:56 PM.
Obviously this sort of problem should not happen. We are monitoring it closely, and investigating it in more detail to try to find the root cause, so that we can take corrective action as necessary to prevent it from happening again. We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this problem.
At approximately 9:30 PM Pacific time, all of our servers began to experience a large “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attack via attempts to login to blogs using the standard WordPress wp-login.php script. This attack was very broad: it attacked thousands of sites across all of our servers, and it came from a huge number of IP addresses.
Processing these requests caused the overall load on all servers to increase. On “web04” the increase was enough to cause the server to start returning “503” errors for Web page requests.
Our servers already have a set of rules to protect against attacks on wp-login.php, but the rules were not quite sufficient to block tonight’s attack. We added a new rule to match tonight’s attack, and it fixed the problem.
We apologize for the time that the “web04” server returned 503 errors. As you can see by reviewing our blog posts we try to be very proactive to protect our customers’ WordPress sites, and hope that the new security rule will prevent future attacks with the same characteristics.
Our business offices will be closed on Wednesday, January 1 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, our support staff will be providing 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 Thursday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
Our business offices will be closed on Wednesday, December 25 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, our support staff will be providing 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 Thursday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
Our business offices will be closed on Thursday, November 28 to observe the US legal holiday for Thanksgiving.
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 Friday, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
Between 11:59 AM and 1:13 PM Pacific time on October 23, 2013, there was an outage on the “web11” server due to a hardware problem. Other servers were not affected.
The hardware has been replaced and the server is running normally again. During the outage, incoming email was queued for delivery. All incoming email has now been delivered to the appropriate mailboxes. No email was lost.
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Our business offices will be closed on Monday, September 2 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.
