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Sometimes this has meant that we skip a month; and sometimes this means that one or more of those pieces of text become outdated and can no longer be used.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:
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.
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.)
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.
We are still working on making our filtering system work for FCG accounts, but expect this to be completed within the next few weeks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can control how aggressive the Spam Funnel is by selecting the Spam Funnel link in the webmail interface.
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.)
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.
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Edit History
20060804: posted
20060805: fix link to access numbers