Internet

April 14, 2011 – We have added some additional blacklists to our normal spam filtering system.  Email coming from servers listed on these blackslists will be blocked with a permanent error and bounced to the sender.  These emails will not be delivered to our customers – even with a *****SPAM***** tag.

The blacklists we have added are:
UCE-Protect Level 1 (More information)
Lashback
Passive Spam Block List
RATS-Dyna

We hope that the addition of these blacklists will reduce the spam coming in to our users.  We take the spam problem VERY seriously and do everything we can to insure that you receive the minimim amount of spam while still receiving all of your legitimate email.  If you feel that our new lists are blocking some of your legitimate email, please contact us at 256-547-6817 or email us at support@internetpro.net.

Update: 04/15/2011 – We have removed the Lashback blacklist from our servers.  It was blocking Yahoo.com emails which also affected AT&T emails (including bellsouth.net).
We are working to remove Yahoo from their blacklist so we can re-implement Lashback on our servers.

Update: 06/01/2011 – We have removed UCEProtect from our servers because they would not allow us to remove false positives without waiting a week.  We have added two additional blacklists to make up for these removals:
Barracuda Reputation Block List
Nix Spam DNSBL – Page is in German

We also added several additional rules to our spam filters to block by content.  These included additional filters on foreign spam, scams, viruses, and porn.

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.

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).