Many, many years ago, some e-mail programs didn’t use a password when sending outgoing mail. That meant they didn’t work with many mail servers, including ours. To help customers with that problem, we used to allow a horrible alternate method called “POP before SMTP”, although it was never recommended or officially supported (it was unreliable and made it harder for us to prevent spam).
Well, here we are in a new millennium (“welcome!”). No popular mail program has needed “POP before SMTP” for more than a decade, and only a small handful of our customers are still using it. But spammers are continually trying to take advantage of the security problems it creates for all e-mail addresses, making it just as much of a nuisance on our end as it ever was.
Because of that, we no longer allow e-mail addresses to send mail using “POP before SMTP” unless they were previously doing so. In other words, if an address wasn’t using “POP before SMTP” before now, it won’t be able to start using it in the future.
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We’ve updated our servers with a Perl security bug fix. This won’t affect most customers, but read on if you know you use Perl scripts on your site.
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We’ll be performing brief maintenance on the Web server that runs the Mailman list interface and archives tonight (June 9, 2011) between 10:00 PM and 11:00 PM Pacific time.
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Microsoft FrontPage was once a popular Web design program. Microsoft stopped selling FrontPage in 2006, though, and we’ve been warning about the end of FrontPage support for a while now (on both our support pages and our blog).
That time has now arrived. Our FrontPage support for new sites will end on September 1, 2011, and support for existing sites will end a year after that.
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World IPv6 Day is now in progress (it started at midnight UTC, which was 5:00 PM Pacific time). For the next 24 hours, many sites on the Internet, including our own www.tigertech.net, are fully IPv6-enabled.
If you have trouble connecting to www.tigertech.net, check other sites like Google, Yahoo and Bing. If you have problems with any of those, you should test your IPv6 connection and notify your ISP or network administrator about any problems.
For more information about IPv6 (and how sites hosted with us can participate), see our previous post: Now We Are Six: IPv6 support.
Today we detected that one of our customers had installed a WordPress plugin on his blog that did something malicious: when the plugin was activated, it sent a stranger an e-mail message allowing full administrator access to the blog.
How did this happen? Well, our customer simply searched the WordPress plugin directory for “Contact Form”, saw the popular “Contact Form 7” plugin listed, then clicked “Install Now”. That all sounds reasonable.
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We’re pleased to announce optional IPv6 support for Web sites hosted with our company (just in time for World IPv6 day next week!).
Most customers shouldn’t use IPv6 yet, and if you don’t know what it is, you can safely ignore this post. But if you’re familiar with IPv6 and interested in adding it to your site, this post explains what you need to know.
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All Web sites on the “farnsworth” Web server have been moved to a new server named “zapp”.
This change was made for reliability; our monitoring systems detected potential hardware problems with the “farnsworth” server earlier today, and the sites were moved so it can be replaced before it causes any problems.
This doesn’t cause any downtime, and customers shouldn’t notice any change — but as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.
At approximately 11:00 PM Pacific time tonight, May 14, the “pazuzu” Web server will be restarted.
As a result, for customers on the “pazuzu” server (only), Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes. Customers on other servers will not be affected.
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A router failure at an upstream Internet “peer” that we connect to caused high packet loss for some Internet connections between 5:18 PM and 5:28 PM Pacific time.
The packet loss grew worse through that period until it exceeded 25%, which is enough to cause pages to fail to load within a browser’s timeout period if your connection was one of the affected ones. (Connections that go through different routers were not affected.)
Network engineers have routed all connections around the failed hardware until it’s replaced, so the problem is resolved. If your part of the Internet was one of the affected ones, please accept our apologies for the problem.
