March 17, 2011 – We will be making a change to one of our circuits to prepare for the addition of more bandwidth and more redundancy to our network. This change is scheduled for 12:00am on Saturday, March 19. We expect there to be a downtime of about 10-15 minutes sometime between 12:00am and 4:00am as the routes propagate.
March 19, 2011 – Maintenance completed. No downtime experienced.
AT&T Network Engineers will be performing a planned maintenance on Birmingham-Alabama Gigabit Access Router 1. The work will be performed on 3/30/2011, during the maintenance window of 12:00AM-6:00AM, CDT. AT&T's goal is to successfully complete the task and restore service within the stated time frame. We apologize for any inconvenience that you may experience. Please be assured all AT&T authorized maintenance activities are to ensure optimal performance of our network facilities and equipment. AT&T Network Engineers will be performing an IOS upgrade and a card replacement. This work should not impact network availability. Please contact us at support@internetpro.netif you have any questions. Update: March 30, 2011
The work has been rescheduled from 3/30/2011 to 4/13/2011 and it will be performed during the standard maintenance window of 12:00AM-6:00AM local router time.
March 7, 2011 – We upgraded our alternate webmail interface today. It is an incremental update that adds a few new features including return receipt and delivery status notification. This new version also lets you check the number of messages in a folder and the size of that folder. The performance of moving or copying all the messages in a folder, renaming or deleting folders is improved. There is now a link in the “compose” window that lets you pick identities. There are also numerous bug fixes and performance enhancements. The alternate webmail interface can be found at https://webmail.internetpro.net.
Wed. January 26, 2011 – We updated the email system to handle TLS (encryption) on POP3 to better secure your email password and data. Unfortunately, some people had their email clients set to leave a copy of their mail on the server. This can be useful at times, but in this case, it will result in receiving those emails again. If you have an inordinate amount of email that you do not wish to receive again, please contact our office at 877-886-6868 or 256-547-6817 and our technicians will be glad to help remove those emails from our server.
Update: Due to the new update, we no longer support POP-before-SMTP authentication, so if your email client was not set to use authentication on the outgoing server, you may experience trouble sending email. If you are having that trouble, use the search blank at the bottom of this page to type in the name of your email client for instructions on email setup or call our office at 877-886-6868 or 256-547-6817 for technical help.
Jan 26, 2011 – 2:00pm – Our server upgrades are complete. Once customer settings have been updated there should be no issues. We have updated our preferred email setup instructions to include the use of SSL (secure socket layer), so you may want to check our instructions for your email client to get the best settings for your program. The new preferred method increases security by encrypting your passwords and emails between you and our server.
January 20, 2011 10:05am – Our mail servers have been blacklisted by some domains because of an ongoing backscatter attack. We are working to isolate the issue.
Backscatter is a type of spam attack where spam mail is sent to email servers with forged header information for the Envelope Sender address. If the email server bounces this email back to the sender, a bounced message usually has the Envelope Recipient set to the Envelope Sender of the original message, and the undeliverable message notification will be sent to the email address of the innocent user. There can also be other unsuspecting email servers in the message path and in a large spam campaign the target systems can be flooded with these backscatter spam messages.
January 20 10:30am – It looks like the mail issue is not actually a backscatter attack, but instead is the result of a misconfigured email list. The list has thousands of members and was set up in such a way that the members could all post. Each post resulted in thousands of sent emails. We are working with the customer who configured the list to resolve the issue. We are also cleaning up emails coming from the list and are working to get our servers delisted from blacklists now that the source of the issue has been isolated.
January 20 10:45am – Most email is flowing normally now, although there are a few domains still delaying delivery of email from our server. Notably aol.com and yahoo.com are still deferring our email. These emails are NOT being rejected and WILL go through, but delivery may take longer than usual for those domains (and possibly some others).
January 20, 11:15am – Yahoo.com is passing our email now. AOL is the last holdout that we have found. We have submitted a request to them for a change in our status, so all we can do now is wait for AOL to get it together.
If you are setting up a new email account on a computer, and you try to log in unsuccessfully 5 or more times, you may cause yourself to be blocked from our mail server. We have put in place blocking mechanisms which stop “brute force attacks” from spammers trying to guess account names and passwords on our server. If our server detects more than 4 failures in less than one minute’s time, your IP address will be blocked. If you are in an office, this can cause everyone in the office to also be blocked because most offices use Network Address Translation (NAT) which makes all of the computers in the your office look like they are coming from the same IP address.
The block will automatically be lifted in one hour, but if you need it removed immediately, please contact one of our technicians at 877-886-6868 (you will be unable to email, so just call). We can help you with the account you are having trouble with and we will be able to manually lift the block so that everyone can send and/or receive their email again.
We do apologize for any trouble this may cause. We feel these systems were needed because of the increase in attacks we have seen on our mail server and we want to protect your data as much as possible and we also want to help stop spammers in any way we can.
December 2, 2001 – 9:09am – Several of our email servers were blacklisted by Comcast for spam. We believe this was due to the earlier attacks on weak passwords by spammers. We have implemented a work around and have requested to be delisted by Comcast. Our customers may have seen issues over the last day or so with delivering email to comcast.net email addresses and possibly some other domains hosted by Comcast. No email was lost – it was just delayed. Our workaround has already taken effect and all email destined for Comcast has now been delivered. We apologize for any inconvenience that may have been caused.
Update 9:45am – We have been removed from Comcast’s blacklist. All operations have returned to noramal.
At 4:07 pm on Nov. 14, 2010, one of our web servers started presenting an FTP error. At that time, users were not able to connect via FTP to update websites. Or technicians responded to the problem within 5 minutes, but have not yet been able to isolate the issue. At 4:45, the server was rebooted in an attempt to bring the FTP service back online. At that time, all services were unavailable on that server. The server came back online at 4:49 pm, however the FTP issue remains. We are currently investigating the cause of the FTP problem, and hope to restore full service shortly.
Nov. 14 2010 5:18pm – At 5:02, the outage escalated due to a misconfiguration of our main firewall. Technicians were attempting to block the FTP DOS attack, and inadvertently blocked all traffic. We are continuing to work on the problem.
Nov 14, 2010 5:30pm – Redundant firewalls have all been restored. Looks like everything is up and running. Our technicians are continuing to check.
Nove 14, 2010 5:38pm – The original FTP denial of service attack has now been resolved. We are sorry for the inconvenience caused by this issue. If you see any problems that you believe may be related to this issue, please give us a call at 256-547-6817 or 877-886-6868 to let our technicians know about it.
PLEASE NOTE: These instructions are for customers of Network Solutions, Inc. We have noticed that several customers of Network Solutions, LLC. have come across these instructions and have not been successful at making these work (because they won’t). If you are a customer of Network Solutions, LLC., you should go to their web site at http://www.networksolutions.com to find the correct instructions.
NOTE 2 (December 17, 2014): The screenshots in this post have incorrect information. The text is correct. We are working to change the screenshots shortly.
Google is making strides in the smartphone marketplace and the Android based devices are becoming very common.
Android-based smartphones and devices include two email clients, one for Gmail and one for other types of email servers including Microsoft Exchange, IMAP and POP3. The following guide will show you how to set up the built-in email application to access an IMAP or POP3 (we support both)email server for incoming email and an SMTP server for outbound email. The setup for both IMAP and POP3 is the same so for the purposes of this guide, we will use POP3. See the page on https://www.netsolinc.com/email-settings-2 for the IMAP settings including server names and port numbers. Please note that there are *MANY* different Android devices out now, so your screen may be slightly different. If you are unable to follow this guide and need further assistance, please call our technical support at 256-547-6817 or 877-886-6868.
Email will begin synchronizing once the credentials and server information is entered correctly.
Once the setup has been completed, you are presented with a list of your messages. While viewing the message list, you are also able to change the settings that are assigned to this account by tapping the Menu icon — which is directly to the left of the Home icon — and then tapping Account settings. The following options are available:
Nov. 3 2010 – Over the past few weeks we have noticed a huge increase in the volume of spam. Although our system does a great job of recognizing spam messages, we found that it was being overloaded by the sheer volume of messages coming in. We have seen many instances where our spam scanning had timed out causing spam email to come through untagged. We have just brought an additional spam scanning server online to address this issue. We are also making changes to the configurations of our spam servers in the hope that we will get more consistent and accurate spam tagging.
Nov. 4 2010 – The new server is now fully online and operational, sharing the learned spam database with all of the other servers. In the past, each of our servers had maintained their own independent database, but those are now consolidated. This consolidation will allow the database to grow faster (taking advantage of all servers at once) and to be the same across all the servers, resulting in more consistent tagging. We hope everyone enjoys the improvements!