Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday, June 7, each of our hosting servers will be restarted. This will cause a brief interruption of service (less than 10 minutes) for each site at some point during this 2 hour period.
The PHP developers recently released versions 5.4.29 and 5.5.13 that fix several bugs. We’ve updated PHP 5.4 and 5.5 on our servers as a result.
We recently explained how to avoid DMARC mail delivery problems with the “Gravity Forms” WordPress plugin.
We’ve added a support article explaining how to avoid DMARC mail delivery problems with the similar “Contact Form 7” plugin, too.
If you use either of these plugins and you’re seeing mail rejected with errors about “DMARC”, the links above will help you fix it.
Customers who forward their mail to Gmail occasionally tell us that they can’t find a message they know someone sent them, even when they’ve searched Gmail for it.
These messages are often eventually found in the “Spam” or “Trash” folders of Gmail. What’s surprising is that by default, Gmail search doesn’t look in these folders at all, so people are (quite reasonably) sure it’s not there.
Between 10:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time on Saturday, May 24, each of our hosting servers will be restarted. This will cause a brief interruption of service (less than 10 minutes) for each site at some point during this 2 hour period.
We’ve updated the MySQL database software on our servers from version 5.5.35 to 5.5.37 for security reasons.
Customers should not notice any changes, as the update merely fixes bugs and doesn’t introduce new features. But as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.
We recently upgraded Mailman to fix a problem for Yahoo and AOL users, which has worked well.
Today we found a problem where since the initial upgrade on April 24, people who tried subscribing to a Mailman list by sending an e-mail message (instead of using the more common Web interface) weren’t properly added to the list.
This was caused by an incompatibility between our mail system and one of the Mailman software changes. We didn’t receive a report of this problem until today because few people try to subscribe this way.
We’ve resolved this: Any delayed subscriptions have been correctly handled and the incompatibility has been fixed. We apologize to anyone affected by it.
In recent days, Yahoo and AOL made technical changes that prevented their own users from sending messages to most mailing lists. (That’s a simplified summary; your favorite search engine will show the gory details if you search for “Yahoo DMARC mailing lists”.)
If you use the Mailman software to run discussion lists, like many of our customers, this is a problem. To fix it, the authors of the Mailman software are making a new version to work around the Yahoo and AOL change.
That new version hasn’t been officially released yet, but we think this is so important that we’ve upgraded our installed copy of Mailman to a “pre-release” version of the fixed software.
Yahoo and AOL users should now be able to send to our customers’ Mailman lists without trouble.
We’ve upgraded the default version of the Perl scripting language on all our servers to the 5.14 series (specifically, to version 5.14.2 plus Debian security patches).
Most of our customers don’t use Perl, but those who do should not notice any problems. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you need assistance.
We’ve upgraded the default version of the Python scripting language on all our servers to the Python 2.7 series (specifically, to version 2.7.3 plus Debian security patches).
The older version 2.6 series of Python was also updated from 2.6.6 to 2.6.8 (plus Debian security patches).
