Blog – Page 33 – Network Solutions, Inc.

Backscatter Email Attack

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.

tnolen2011-10-25T19:51:08-05:00January 20, 2011|News and Updates|Comments Off

Inclement Weather

January 10, 2011 – Due to the winter storm, our store front will be closed today (Monday). However, our staff will still be available via phone. Our office number is 256-547-6817 or 877-886-6868 and option 8 will connect you with a technician. Billing, scheduling and other issues can be addressed by dialing extension 126 at the voice prompt. As always, we can also be reached by email at support@internetpro.net.

January 10, 2011 – Due to a lack of support calls, we are going to let our staff enjoy a snow day. We will still be offering technical support via the phone, but it will be on a call back basis for the remainder of the day.

January 10, 2011 – 9:00pm – Looks like we are going to run the same routine on Tuesday. Technical support will be available by hitting 8. Billing, scheduling, etc. will be available by dialing extension 126. We expect some additional calls on Tuesday as south Alabama warms up and drys out, however many of our staff would be put in danger if they were required to get to our office.

January 11, 2011 – 2:00pm – We have opened the office for normal business. The roads look like they will be bad tomorrow, so if you want to pick up your computer, pay a bill or whatever, you may want to come by this afternoon. Just be careful!

January 12, 2011 – Our office is open for business as usual today. Normal office hours apply.

nwebb2011-10-25T19:51:15-05:00January 10, 2011|News and Updates|Comments Off

Shared Hosting Issue

December 30, 2010 9:15am – A bad security update on one of our shared web hosts has caused some MySQL enabled websites to be disabled. We are working on the issue. The fix may involve migration of affected sites to another server or restoration from backup. We do not have an ETR (estimated time to repair) as yet.

10:30 am – We have initiated repairs using both options — restore AND migration. Some affected sites are beginning to come online as they are being moved to other servers. The restoration is still in progress.

11:25 am – Our restoration of backups has completed and all sites seem to be back online. We also managed to migrate many sites to a new server (this was planned for the future, but got done now) and those sites are also online. We believe that all sites are now operating normally. If you have a site that is still having trouble, please contact support by emailing us at support@internetpro.net or calling 877-886-6868.

nwebb2011-10-25T19:51:22-05:00December 30, 2010|News and Updates|Comments Off

Why did my email stop working?

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.

tnolen2011-10-25T19:42:15-05:00December 14, 2010|FAQ, Internet|Comments Off

Emergency Maintenance

December 6, 2010 – We will be performing some emergency maintenance on our primary network attached storage (NAS) system tonight starting at approximately 2:00am. The maintenance will impact some virtual servers. At the same time, we will be applying OS updates to all virtual servers that need them. We expect the maintenance to take less than one hour. The NAS maintenance will resolve an issue caused by two failed drives. Normally, because of the redundant nature of the NAS, this type of work would not impact any virtual servers, but the failures that have occurred are going to force the NAS offline for a brief period. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

December 7, 2010 – 3:00am – The emergency maintenance has been performed successfully, and all services have been returned to normal.

nwebb2011-10-25T19:51:30-05:00December 6, 2010|News and Updates|Comments Off

Comcast Blacklist

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.

tnolen2011-10-25T19:51:53-05:00December 2, 2010|News and Updates|Comments Off

Email Issue

November 24, 2010 8:30 am – We implemented an upgrade on our email system which increases the security of email transmission. The upgrade was supposed to be seamless, so it was not announced. However, this morning we have received sporadic reports of email not going through. We are investigating the issue to see if the two are related. We will be posting updates here.

November 24 8:50 am – It looks like some spammers have compromised one or more email accounts and are sending out mass volumes of spam through our servers. We are actually delivering email, but it is being delayed because of the volume of email. We are working on removing the malicious spam from our system and identifying the compromised email account(s).

Note: No email has been lost (except the spammer’s email). It has just been delayed a little. As of 9:00, it looks like almost 100% of delayed email has been delivered. There are a few ISPs who have temporarily delayed email coming from our mail server due to the spam originating from it, but those blocks should be cleared shortly.

November 24 9:08am – We have identified the email account which was being used by the spammers to relay messages. We have changed the password on the account and blocked the spammer’s IP address. This user made the common mistake of having the username and password be the same thing. For example, if the email address was user@internetpro.net, the password was user. This is something the spammers regularly try to find, so if you have an easy password on your account such as this we STRONGLY suggest you change it. You can change it by going to our home page at https://www.netsolinc.com and clicking on “Modify Email Account Settings” or by clicking this link.

November 24 2:40pm – The spammers have apparently gathered several accounts with usernames and passwords which are the same. We are watching the system, and as we find the spammers exploiting an account, we are changing the password for the account. We are attempting to call the affected users, but we have not been able to reach everyone. If you are having email trouble all of the sudden, and your password is the same as your username, then please call us at 256-547-6817 or 877-886-6868 so that we can help you reset your password.

November 25, 2010 – 9:35am – The spammers are still finding accounts with weak passwords. We are eliminating them as we see them being exploited. We put a system in place yesterday which alerts us of unusual email volume and allows us to detect the attack more quickly. Most users should not see any issues, however it is possible that you may see your email client get disconnected from the email server if we happen to be stopping an attack at the moment you are sending or receiving an email. We did not mention it yesterday, but the security enhancement we put in place a couple of days ago (mentioned at the first of this post) did NOT have anything to do with these attacks. The security we put in place did not work with bad passwords, but it actually encrypts the email as it is sent to to other servers (if they support encryption).

nwebb2011-10-25T19:48:54-05:00November 24, 2010|Internet, News and Updates|Comments Off

Web Server Problem

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.

tnolen2011-10-25T19:52:03-05:00November 14, 2010|News and Updates|Comments Off

Email Setup on Mac Mail (OS X 10.5 and higher)

Open Mail (click it on the Dock or open it from the Applications folder).
If the “Welcome to Mail” assistant does not appear, choose Add Account from the File menu.
Fill in the Full Name, Email address, and Password fields.
Note: Your email account password will be stored in Keychain and used automatically to login to your email account when you open Mail.
Deselect “Automatically set up account” if it is available or enabled. Click Continue to proceed.
Choose the Account Type. This will normally be POP unless you have been told otherwise.
Give your account a useful description, such as your email address or “My Network Solutions email”. It can be called whatever you want.
Enter your Incoming Mail Server which is pop.internetpro.net, email address and password. Note that by default, your user name will automatically be filled in with the first part of your email address. Make sure that the User Name field contains your entire email address in all lower case letters.
Click on Continue to proceed.
For Outgoing Mail Server, a useful description such as the server name or “Network Solutions Email Server”.
Enter your outgoing mail server which is smtp.internetpro.net.
Select “Use Authentication” and enter your Email Address and Password. Click Continue to proceed.
If prompted, enter your Outgoing Mail Security settings. Click Continue to proceed.
Verify your settings in the Account Summary. Check “Take account online”. Click “Create” to complete the process.

After completing these steps you should be able to send and receive email via this account. If you can’t send or receive email, please call us at 256-547-6817 or 877-886-6868 for assistance.

nwebb2012-02-24T21:30:40-06:00November 11, 2010|Documentation, FAQ, Internet|Comments Off

Email Setup on Android Device

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.

Tap the upward pointing arrow to get to the app menu (figure 1)
Tap on the Email icon (figure 2)

Alternate Text

Enter your email address and password, then tap Next (figure 3)
Select POP3 account (figure 4)

Alternate Text

Enter your Username, Password, POP3 server (pop.internetpro.net, etc) and Port (110) (figure 5)
Click on Security type; a new window will pop up and allow you to select the level of encryption (None, SSL or TLS).
Select TLS (not with Accept all certificates – the figure below is incorrect now) (figure 6)

Once the Security type has been selected the pop up window will close and you can continue to the next step
Select when to delete email from server; the options are “Never” or “When I delete from Inbox”, then tap Next (figure 5)
Enter outgoing server settings which consist of SMTP Server (smtp.internetpro.net), Port (587), and security type (TLS – not with Accept all certificates – figure below is incorrect) (figure 7)
Your outgoing or SMTP server requires you login so check the box next to Require sign-in, enter your email address and password, and tap the Next button
Select email checking frequency and notification options ( figure 8 )

Finally, name the account and input your display name (figure 9)

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:

Account name – this is just a name to let you recognize the email account
Your name
Email check frequency – more often uses more battery
Default account (make the current account the default email account on your Android device)
Email notifications
Select Ringtone
Vibrate
Incoming settings (to modify IMAP or POP3 server settings)
Outgoing settings (to modify SMTP server settings)

tnolen2014-12-17T22:49:21-06:00November 8, 2010|Documentation, FAQ, Internet|Comments Off