MV Communications Newsletter: July 2006
Click here for a frames version
In this issue:
Unfamiliar or bizarre terms that you run across might
be in the newsletter glossary
(-- if not, suggest that we add it.)
Newsletter Tardiness
Those holes in the newsletter grid at
http://newsletter.mv.net/
are not imaginary-- sorry to say that we've missed many, many months.
We do like to try to have a monthly update but sometimes there is enough
other pressing work to be done that writing these notes falls through
the cracks, and then through the floor below, and into
the toilet. Missing a succession of newsletters gains quite a bit of
inertia (if the lack of something can be said to have inertia).
Other than this, we really have no excuse. But let's make another
one anyway:
One of the problems with the newsletters is with their supposedly
monthly format. When writing them, we often produce pieces of text that
are potentially interesting on their own, but don't provide enough
material for a monthly emission. Sometimes this has meant that we skip
a month; and sometimes this means that one or more of those pieces of
text become outdated and can no longer be used. This brings to mind a
couple of pieces of classic advice:
- Don't let the best become the enemy of the good. It is
probably better to present what small snippets we have, rather than
waiting too long for enough snippets to combine into a whole;
- Form follows function. The approach we take is one of form
forcing function, which is backwards.
So we'd like to think about new ways of presenting "newsletter" items and
holding discussions. There's no reason that these things have to be
presented in a monthly collection, and every reason to have each
presented on its own. Down the line, we'd like to move to a more
free-form style of newsletter material, whether this be via a
blog, a newsletter web site without a calendar, a forum, one or more
usenet forums, or something else entirely. If you have thoughts, feel
free to use the feedback link below, to post in the mv.forum.general
usenet newsgroup, or to contact us via any other means.
A few of the items in this issue are for catching up: they present
some things that we have done, or things that have happened in the world,
since the last newsletter in July 2004. Most of this text was indeed
written in the months that they happened, but as described above, simply
didn't see the light of day. (Other text that may have been written is
simply no longer relevant.)
Much of the new text in this newsletter relates to mail handling.
That's because it's one of the things we've been working on a lot, and
also because with all the old items, the newsletter is already running on
a bit. And it will leave other topics for later.
- Older news (marked with [old])
-
Sox [old]
First in the "really important old news" department: a very belated
congratulations to the Boston Red Sox on a tremendous World Series
victory! It was so stunning that we couldn't write a newsletter until
well after they had lost again. (Yeah, that's it.)
How does this relate to your Internet experience? Here are some fun
sites that might help resurrect that world championship glow. (For
those of you who aren't Red Sox fans, well, you can look too.)
-
http://www.newseum.org/frontpages/redsox/
- The wonderful newseum
site, which
exhibits information from news outlets around the world, including access
to a zillion newspapers' front pages, gives you this snapshot of headlines
the morning after the Red Sox win.
-
http://boston.redsox.mlb.com/
- The official Red Sox site (and a good use of subdomains!).
-
http://www.bostonsportsmedia.com/
- Bruce Allen's blog about what's being said in the Boston-local sports
media. Look over his shoulder to see what's interesting to read today,
or what you might have missed lately. (This is one among several.)
National Dial-up [old]
[November, 2004]
We're happy to tell you that we've added a new suite of dialup numbers
that give you more choices, including numbers in most towns and cities
across the US. These are considered "off-net" numbers, and here's why:
Our on-net dialup numbers are the ones that bring you into our
equipment directly. This is the sort of dialup access that we've
provided throughout our existence. When you dial one of these numbers,
it connects you to a phone line coming into access servers at our
Manchester, NH location. For most callers, this is the preferred
access, as it gets you onto our network, uses our bandwidth, gets your
call closer to our servers, and so forth. When you connect via the
on-net numbers, our servers can tell that you are an MV user.
The off-net numbers are provided via wholesalers. When
you dial one of these numbers, you reach the wholesaler network, where
you use some of their resources. You still have access to all of our
servers, although your connection to those servers will travel over the
Internet to and from the wholesaler network(s).
The off-net numbers should be used mainly when the primary
on-net numbers can't. There are a few adjustments that you
need to make before calling the off-net numbers:
- "realm" login. You need to configure your login
information to add a "realm" so that the wholesaler can associate your
identity with MV. This just means adding an at-sign and the "mv.com"
domain (or "fcgnetworks.net" domain) name after your login name. So
if you're an MV user currently logging in as "Psomebody" just change
your login to be "Psomebody@mv.com" .
- SUBMISSION for mail. In order to send email, you will
need to configure your email program to use a submission protocol when
accessing our mail servers. This is something that we've been moving
towards for all users for some years now. So far it's been optional
for on-net users, but it's required when you dial the
off-net numbers (this is because our servers can't tell that an
off-net user is an MV customer without it). This is another major
topic in this newsletter edition, so we won't belabor it further here
other than to suggest that you see the section
about it, and to let you know that it's required for off-net
dialup access.
These changes will work even when you call the on-net numbers
too, so once you've made a few changes, you don't have to undo them.
And because at least one of them (the email submission requirement) will
be required for all users eventually, we'd encourage you to make the
changes whether or not you plan to call the off-net numbers.
All of our access numbers, including the new off-net ones,
can be found at our
access numbers page.
New Usenet News Server [old]
[April, 2005]
In other new news, our long-promised new Usenet News server is now
in place.
What's Usenet News? While there's more to it than this,
basically it provides a way for people all over the world to join in
conversations and discussions. These discussions are divided into tens
of thousands of areas called "newsgroups," each classified and named in
a hierarchical fashion. A newsgroup name is effectively a list of its
hierarchical classifications, more general to more specific, separated
by periods. For example, a newsgroup named "rec.arts.comics" is
specifically about "comics" within a more general category of "arts"
that's within a still more general category of "rec" (recreation).
Individual hierarchies are usually referred to with a "*" standing in for
the most specific part, so the "rec" hierarchy is referred to as "rec.*"
. (If you need to speak the name, you pronounce the periods as "dot," so
"rec.arts.comics" is "rec dot arts dot comics", and "rec.*" is "rec dot
star"). Note that you don't just type in random names (although that
sometimes works since there are so many groups); newsgroups are
explicitly created according to the rules of the hierarchy they belong
in. These newsgroups are carried on thousands of servers around the
world, with articles being sent from one system to another and
duplicated from system to system (in the jargon, one system "feeds"
another; most systems have a number of feeds in order to make sure
articles aren't missed.) You may access a newsgroup on a particular
server, while another person accesses the same newsgroup on a different
server. The result is many many megabytes of discussions flowing into
and out of each server per day.
MV has been providing Usenet news since we started, and the people
behind MV have been running Usenet servers since about 1981. Although
it's best to use a "newsreader" program, many web browsers have news
browsing capabilities. A full introduction to usenet news would be way
beyond the scope of this newsletter; fortunately you can find lots of
information about it by using a web search engine and searching for
things such as "Usenet News."
And this leads us to the actual newsletter item: the new server. The
new news server has considerably more disk space than its previous
incarnation, and is using more efficient storage mechanisms with better
administrative control. As before, we've set up the server to focus
primarily on non-binaries newsgroups, as we don't believe that Usenet is
appropriate for most of the kinds of binary data that it's often used
for. (However, we do continue to receive a subset of the binaries
groups available and are willing to add legitimate ones if there is
demand.) We've also added some very high-class feeds.
The new news server can be accessed via a newsreader, as before, at
the name "news.mv.net". MV also offers a way to browse newsgroup
hierarchies: go to the
MV Newsgroup Finder to wander through the hierarchies of groups that we
carry (thanks, again, to DJ Delorie). Entries are either hierarchy
names (bold, and ending in ".*") or a newsgroup name. Click on a
hierarchy name to show its members; click on a newsgroup name to browse
that group, as long as you've got your browser configured for NNTP
access.
Power Outages [old]
[March, 2005]
Since the last newsletter, downtown Manchester (where our data center is
located) was hit by two substantial power outages. The first began at
about 7:30pm on December 23 (2004), and lasted about 6 hours. The
second hit at around 2:25 AM on March 15, and lasted for 8 hours. In
both cases we patched some telephone handsets around our phone system
and MV personnel took calls (often in the dark, or by candle light)
while waiting for power to be restored.
These were rare events -- in fact were the only two outages that we've
seen since we moved our office to this location back in the spring of
1997. We take precautions for power events that lie within the realm of
reasonable day-to-day (indeed year-to-year) expectations, and have
plenty of battery backup to keep us going through brownouts, power
glitches, and surges which do happen from time to time.
End of older news
FCG Networks support
IMPORTANT: Please be aware that the FCG-related domain names
including fcgnetworks.net, cyberportal.net, and
coopresources.net are not owned by MV, and will be going away as
of September 1. This is covered in more detail in a later section.
Just about two years ago, we began providing technical and support
services for dialup customers of FCG Networks, another one of the
original NH ISPs. FCG Networks had decided to go in a different
direction, and as of September 2004 we entered into an agreement to
gradually take over all responsibility for those dialup customers, as
well as some DSL and some others. You may have used domain names such
as fcgnetworks.net, cyberportal.net, coopresources.net, and perhaps
others, but for ease of discussion we'll just use the term "FCG" as a
succinct shorthand.
(Astute readers will probably notice that two years ago is also the
time that we fell down on the task of producing newsletters.)
If you're one of these customers, you've undoubtedly heard from us
(perhaps too often!). But indeed, during this time we've attempted to
minimize the disruption to FCG users as best we could: we've continued
to support the email addresses, dialup logins, personal web pages, and
related things in the same way that FCG Networks did. When we've had to
contact you to make changes, it's been for things that couldn't be
helped (such as new phone numbers to dial, and different billing
procedures).
We have tried to make the transition for FCG users as painless as
possible. But having two separate support and technology models for
customers is not always completely ideal (for us and for you).
Sometimes when there are two very different ways of doing similar things,
we need to choose just one approach for everyone, which may involve
enhancing either one or the other.
One of the most significant of these choices relates to the handling
of incoming email. FCG Networks used, for some of its mail customers,
an external mail handling service. This service offered certain
filtering and other options that are similar to those that we have
developed here at MV. We strongly prefer not to use an external service
for something as important and fundamental to our operations as email,
and so we are in the final throes of weaning all users away from
external mail handling, to use instead a common approach for all
customers. Access to filtering choices is through a webmail
interface that we have developed, and so a related change will be in
replacing the old webmail interface that FCG users have used with the MV
one. Note: we're still working on adding this to the webmail
for FCG users: expect to see it in late August.
Apart from these filtering-related changes, we will continue to
support FCG-style services for the reasonably foreseeable future. On
the other hand, over the years we've developed our own mail services
that are in some ways different from FCG-style email services. (If you
are curious, we've recapped a bit about how our email works a bit later
in this newsletter, both as a review for MV customers and and an
introduction to FCG customers, and we've specifically marked the areas
in which MV-side email is different from FCG-style.)
It's natural to expect that some significant advances that we make to
email services will be done on the MV side. Customers who are using
FCG-style services are welcome to convert to MV-side addresses at any
time in the future. But there is no rush to do so.
The next couple of sections describe some of the work we have done on
email handling, and some comments about how this will affect all of
our email customers.
Sending Mail: Ports 25 and 587
In our last newsletter (stretch your memories, now..) we talked at
length about things related to how you should be configuring your mail
clients to send mail. We also talked about how we would finally start
blocking access to IP port 25 (don't worry if this is confusing, but
read on) after having promised to do so for several years. Because it's
been so long without another mention of it, and because we'd like FCG
users to read about this too, we're going to bring it up again here.
Here will be a fairly short summary, and then we'll give a link back to
the previous (much longer) discussion.
For most people, when you configure your mail program, one of the
things you tell it is what mail server to use. Your mail program then
sends your outgoing mail to that mail server. It does this by
accessing a specific TCP/IP port number on the mail server: that number
is how the mail server knows what sort of service you are asking it to
perform. Up until about 1998, the only standard number to use was port
25: this is the port that mail servers use to send each other mail.
Users' mail clients typically aren't mail servers, but there was no
other port to use, so they too used port 25. Since that time, though,
the handling of email has been changing to distinguish the cases of mail
servers talking to each other from mail users submitting mail into the
mail system. Another port, number 587, is now commonly used for the
latter purpose. There are three significant things to know about this:
- For Internet users who receive a dynamic IP address (this is most
everyone: if it's not you, you will know it since you will have
specifically asked for a static IP address), most ISPs now prevent those
users from accessing port 25 on anything other than the ISPs' local
mail servers (and sometimes on all servers). The main push for this
has been caused by spam and other abuse. Many computers become
infected with a virus or a trojan that will cause the computer to
try to access mail servers all around the net, using port 25. This
is a primary vector for unwanted mail that flies around the
Internet, and by blocking access to port 25, ISPs can help prevent
this. Viruses and other malware may adapt (and in some cases
already have) to make use of the designated mail server that you
configure into your program, but at least the ISP can have a handle
on the origin of any bad mail that gets through this way. We have
been doing this blocking for MV-side customers with dynamic IP
addresses, and we will be making sure that we apply the blocking to
FCG users as well.
- Even with blocking of port 25 in general, you may still be able
to access port 25 of the outgoing mail server of the ISP that you
are using. We do allow you to access port 25 on our mail servers,
provided that your IP address is one of ours (i.e. that you are
getting access via our network). As this may change, we encourage
you to move to using port 587 if you are not already doing so.
- Port 587 is now the standard port to use for submitting email
into the mail system from an end-user mail program. Port 587 is
specifically reserved for users who are authorized to use the mail
server that offers it. Think of it this way: port 25 is for
strangers, and port 587 is for people we know. Strangers are
subject to certain restrictions (such as not being able to relay
mail through a mail server, or being denied access due to blocklists
or other reasons); those whom we know have authorization to do
specific things. The implication is that when you use port 587, the
mail server must be able to tell who you are (or at least that you
are somebody recognizable). Accomodate this by configuring a
username and password into your mail program. The username and
password may be the same as your dialup access, or it may be those
of one of your mailboxes.
Anyone using the off-net dialup numbers should already be familiar with
most of these things, as the wholesaler providing those numbers also does
blocking of port 25.
Our previous discourse on this subject may be found
in this section of the July 2004 newsletter.
FCG domain name changes
Per a previous section, we have been providing support and services
for FCG customers without you having to change much about the way you
use the Internet. You've been able to continue to use the FCG domain
name including fcgnetworks.net, cyberportal.net, and
coopresources.net as before. However, we do not own those domain
names, and while we expected to be able to continue to use them longer,
we've recently been told to expect them to be withdrawn as of September
1, 2006.
To prepare for this, we've registered and set up a few new domain
names that you can choose from. These domain names can be used in the
same way (or similar ways) as the old ones, but the use of any of them does
require that you make some changes. Please go to our
FCG resources page at
http://home.mv.net/fcg/
to learn more about these substitute domain names. When you switch to
one of these new domain names, you will continue to use the same mail
server and similar services as before.
Alternatively, you can choose to set up an account on the MV side of
things. You can chose to do this now or later or not at all. If you
defer the choice and switch to an MV-side address later, you will still
be able to keep your address in one of these new domain names, as long
as MV continues to own those names (we plan on keeping them, of course).
FCG incoming mail changes
As mentioned above we are wrapping up plans to move all customers to a
common way of handling incoming mail. For FCG users, this means that
you will be moving to MV's internal mail filtering (and other handling),
away from an externally-provided gateway service. We believe this will
provide a better solution over the long term. Certainly if you find
things that are lacking, we would like to know about them so we can
address them in the future.
The upsides: all mail that we handle will be done in a consistent
manner, in ways that we can control and improve, and without being affected
by issues we have no control over.
The downsides: we do not have a way to automatically get your
old settings (which are, after all, maintained by somebody else) and apply
them to your settings here. This means that if you have installed some
custom mail handling settings with your FCG account, you should read or
scan the following section(s) to learn a little about how to set up similar
handling. If there's a silver lining to this, this will give you a chance
to familiarize yourself with the interface that we provide.
MV incoming mail recap
Because it's been a while, and for the benefit of FCG users, we'd like
to summarize a few of the elements of our handling of incoming email.
This summary includes how we organize email accounts and the facilities
we provide for filtering and accessing your incoming email, and how in
some details MV-side email is different from FCG-style. (Outgoing
mail has been summarized above.)
There are several components to incoming mail, as described here:
- An email address
- An email address, as you almost certainly know, is the handle that
people use to send mail to a particular destination. It has a form
like localpart@domainpart -- where localpart is usually
some indicative name of some person or thing within the domainpart.
- A mailbox
- A mailbox is a place where email is delivered. A mailbox has a name,
and it also has one or more folders where message may be stored, as well
as filters, which provide delivery instructions.
- Name: the name by which you access a mailbox. This is
just a name: it can, theoretically, be most anything. The
distinction between a mailbox name and an email address is sometimes
confusing, so on the MV side we often make the mailbox name relate
in some way to the primary email address that it's used for.
On the FCG side, this is a mailbox name that you have set up;
the name is whatever you have chosen.
On the MV side, traditionally this name has been formed by taking
your mv.com subdomain name, and appending a hyphen and the first two
letters of the first address that the mailbox was created to handle.
For example if your MV account's domain name is "mocv.mv.com" and
you have created a mailbox to accept mail for "mem@mocv.mv.com", a
likely mailbox name would be "mocv-me". Other forms of mailbox
names might relate to a different domain name (e.g.,
"example.com-me" for a mailbox created to initially go with
"mem@example.com"), or simply a numbered mailbox like "box000001" .
The thing to remember is that the flow of email goes from email
address into mailbox, and any email address (under our control) can
be configured to go into any mailbox. A single mailbox can receive
mail for many different email addresses: the name of the mailbox is
unrelated to the email address itself.
- Folders. Each mailbox can have one or more folders for
storage of email. You are doubtless familiar with email folders
that you can maintain on your own personal computer, but did you
know that you can have folders on our mail servers as well? The
primary folder is called the INBOX -- without other
delivery instructions, all mail is delivered into the INBOX. If you
access your mailbox via the POP3 protocol, you can only access the
INBOX directly. However, if you use IMAP or
MV's webmail interface
or the FCG webmail interface (or
potentially some other webmail front-end), you can access any of the
other folders too.
- Filters: rules and instructions.
A filter can be associated with each mailbox. The filter contains
a set of rules and instructions that tell the system how to process the
mail that is delivered to that mailbox. Filter instructions can include
things like what folder(s) to file the message into, some other email
address to send the message to (instead of keeping it), or indeed
whether to keep the message at all. One important part of filters is
instructions for dealing with unwanted mail (like spam).
We are still working on making our filtering system work for
FCG accounts, but expect this to be completed within the next few
weeks.
- Access
- When you have incoming messages stored in mailbox folders on our
mail server, you need to access those messages. Most people will
access via one of the ways described here.
- Email program. You'll likely have a mail program such
as Thunderbird, Outlook, Eudora, Pegasus, Mulberry (sadly defunct),
or one of several other popular commercial or free products.
Alternatively, many web browsers support access to email in the same
ways as these standalone mail programs do. Standalone mail programs
tend to do a better job at managing email, since that's what they
are designed for, but for most purposes a browser-based program will
do fine. You configure your email program with information about
the mailbox (or mailboxes) that you want it to access, including the
mailbox name, the password for that mailbox, and the server that
that mailbox is on.
Email clients (email programs) can access mail from a mailbox using
one of two protocols: POP or IMAP. POP, which might also be referred
to more specifically as POP3, is usually the default unless you specify
IMAP. Using POP, you only have access to your INBOX folder. IMAP (also
more specifically called IMAP4) gives you access to your other mailbox
folders, and also gives you much better coordination between your mail
program and the mailbox server.
- Webmail. A webmail server is a web server that gets you
access to your mailbox. Webmail typically uses the IMAP protocol to
communicate with the mailbox server, and thus gives you access to all
of your mailbox's folders. Webmail is very handy in situations where
you don't have access to your email program, or where you simply want
to be able to do quick operations on your mailbox. MV's webmail
services is at
http://webmail.mv.net
and is also the place where you can manage your filters and other
preferences. The name of the webmail server for FCG users will
depend on which of the new domain names you have chosen, and is
given to you when you choose the new name. Note again that the
filtering options are still being added for the FCG side: expect
them in a few weeks.
- Control and configuration
- The management of your mailbox. This includes such things as:
- Mapping email address to mailboxes. This is something
that MV staff must do at present, but on the MV-side we hope to give
you some more control over this the future.
- Filter management. Filter management is done through
MV's webmail interface. Some of the changes to filter management are
discussed in following sections.
MV incoming mail changes
Since the last newsletter we have done a lot of work in our continuing
efforts to improve mail handling. There have been improvements in the
mail system in general, in the facilities that we provide for filtering
unwanted mail, and in the software that we use for all of this.
Philosophical change: filtering by default
One upcoming change relates to philosophy, and we'd like to start
with that. Up until now our approach to filtering is to provide some
elemental tools that you can apply to your email when it reaches your
mailbox: we provide various functions, and we let you enable them. We
have felt that you should actively enable any filtering that you want,
and so by default nothing is done with your mail unless you do enable
some filtering. You might say that this is an approach that only sits
well with techies and geeks- but that is, after all, our heritage.
Times change, and by now the vast majority of people expect some
amount of screening on their mailbox. And indeed, our servers apply a
number of tests to incoming mail to reject clearly unwanted stuff before
it even gets in the door. So there was already a bit of an inconsistency
in our approach. As of this writing, only about 25% of mailbox owners
have enabled any sort of filtering on their mail here, and we believe
it's because they don't realize that they need to. Therefore, one major
upcoming change will be to enable a basic level of mailbox filtering on
all accounts. Those who aren't interested in this can still disable it.
With the default filtering, if any message doesn't get a pass, it will
be filed temporarily into a "Caught Spam" folder. This bears highlighting:
UPCOMING CHANGE: If you don't set up any mailbox filtering
preferences, a basic level of filtering will be applied. Any mail that
is discarded by this filtering will be temporarily stored in your
"Caught Spam" folder.
Expiration of some folders
Relatedly, an issue we have found for some people who have enabled
filtering on their mailboxes is that they have chosen to file
spam and other unwanted email into "Caught Spam" and "Trash" folders,
without ever checking those folders. The result is that those folders
fill up over time, eventually bringing the mailbox over its quota,
at which point new mail is rejected. We have long been threatening, er,
promising to expire mail from these folders, and we will begin
doing it in the near future. This, too, bears highlighting:
UPCOMING CHANGE: We will be expiring email from your
"Caught Spam" and "Trash" folders.
When expired, these folders won't be completely removed: rather, the
oldest messages will be removed to make room for the newer ones. The
expiration parameters are still being worked out as of this writing.
The new "Spam Funnel"
We have introduced something that we call the "Spam Funnel." This
applies a series of basic sanity checks to each incoming message. It is
done in addition to (and prior to) the other filtering and filing
options which are still available (via the MV webmail interface). And
in fact the Spam Funnel takes no action by itself, it merely does some
analysis on the message. This analysis is given as a sort of score, which
may be tested by a rule within the filtering options.
You can control how aggressive the Spam Funnel is by selecting the
Spam Funnel link in the webmail interface.
Improvements in filtering
Another major focus of our efforts has been on the tools and processes
that operate to deliver mail. Without going into a huge amount of detail,
as this newsletter is long and late enough already, here's a brief
accounting of some of these things:
- Incoming mail server
- On the MV side, we have completely rewritten the mail component
that accepts incoming mail (specifically, the SMTP server: the
'qmail-smtpd' piece of the "qmail" package that we use.) This rewrite
makes it easier (and, for that matter, possible) to analyze incoming
mail and sources of mail, and to expand on analysis and related
operations in the future, including feedback and control over outgoing
mail.
- Mail Client Assessment Server
- As a companion to the new SMTP module, we have also developed what
we call a "Mail Client Assessment Server" . This is a server (a piece
of software, i.e. a program) that takes input from other programs, and
that other programs can consult to find information regarding the
reputation of various agents that send mail to us and through us. In
coordination with the SMTP server and other tools, this functions as
an automatic feedback system that helps to remove a lot of the manual
element in controlling the flood of unwanted email. We will talk a
little more about this in future newsletter editions, but suffice it
to say here that this has already had a great impact on our incoming
spam volume, and we plan on turning on more advanced elements of it in
the future. As with the filtering options, we'll be working to hook
this into the FCG-side mail server over the coming weeks.
- Mail Delivery Agent
- MV's MDA (Mail Delivery Agent, the program responsible for
handling your mail once it's been accepted by our server) was
developed here for our needs and has been in use for the past several
years. This is the program that ultimately handles your filtering and
delivery instructions. Even though we've made considerable
improvements since, most users have been using a version that was
frozen as of October 2004 (!). There are a number of reasons for
this, some of which are about compatibility with other tools and,
particularly, some changes in operation for those who hand-create
their own delivery scripts (all two or three of you). Rather than go
into that here, we've posted a summary of the changes to the
mv.forum.email newsgroup.
In the immediate future we will be retiring the older (2004)
version, and the newest release of the MDA will be in use by all
users. Those who have enabled or changed their filtering preferences
since about May of this year are already using the latest MDA version.
Also, we mentioned this above, but here it is again more exactly:
in the past, if you did not select any filtering preferences, MV's MDA
did not get used for your mail, and no specific filtering was done for
you. In the near future, MV's MDA will be invoked for all mail, and
some default filtering will take place unless you specifically disable
it.
More to Come
There's more to say about email but we've likely overloaded you already.
In future newsletters, we'll talk about some more of the nitty-gritty of
email handling, including more focus on outgoing mail and rate limits
and permissions, on virus detection and filtering, on enabling vacation
or out-of-office email notices, on quotas and expirations, on email
signing and signature validation, on techniques to foil bounce
forgeries, and on other things that may not be in the crystal ball just
this moment. And, believe it or not, topics that don't relate to email
at all!
MV turns 15
In the "burying the lead" department:
MV Communications, Inc., was incorporated on June 21, 1991, and so
we've recently passed our 15th anniversary. On that date in 1991, we
were continuing to provide "domain park" services and email via UUCP,
but were still not charging for services. It was a little while before
we got our first live backbone connection turned up, and (although we
think of September as our service, aka real, anniversary), we
began billing in October of 1991.
Interesting Link(s)
This is our sometimes section where we mention one or more sites
that we find interesting to one or more of us. Items here do
not necessarily have anything to do with MV (and often do not), nor
do they necessarily have anything to do with our business or anything
else we do. (It should go without saying that we make no
representation about anything contained on those web sites.)
- www.woot.com Woot!
- Woot isn't exactly new, but this newsletter isn't exactly timely.
Each day, starting at about midnight, woot offers a single product for
sale. When the inventory of that product is gone, the sale is done.
(Popular woot days can end very early.) Products are typically
overstocked new or refurbished items usually (but not always) related to
technology or gadgets, and almost always with a very low shipping cost.
There is also a weekly web contest (for fun) for woot users to
participate in.
A companion site,
wine.woot.com
Woot Wine, offers a weekly wine selection in a similar way (though we
doubt that the wines are ever refurbished). If you are in a state
(such as New Hampshire) to which wines may be shipped, you may find this
interesting.
Note Well: we have no affiliation with this site, and make
no recommendation one way or another.
Your feedback?
Do you have feedback on this newsletter (or past or future newsletters)?
If so, please either:
- Go here to fill out our
simple feedback form, or;
- Send us email at mv-feedback (on our domain, mv.com).
Edit History
20060804: posted
20060805: fix link to access numbers
|