Midcoast Internet Solutions

System
News & Notices

November 2003

• Nov 23, 2003 12:30pm-1:10pm. The server for www.midcoast.com needed an unscheduled reboot. The midcoast.com webpage and authentication had trouble during this time.
• Nov 22, 2003 The email rule enforment described below has been disabled because there are too many misconfigured email servers lacking able administrators. This was predominantly MS exchange 5.5 servers that failed to follow this rule. Instead of being rejected, note that this email rule violation may increase the score in SpamAssassin, since the vast majority of email senders in violation are infected computers and spammers. Customers who'd been affected by this in the past week or so may want to whitelist those with misconfigured mail servers.
• Nov 19, 2003 A tiny fraction of a percent of people on the internet sending email to an @midcoast.com address have been getting an error message back saying "Helo command rejected: Host not found". This is not a problem with the MIS system. This is our mailserver upgrade better enforcing long standing internet email rules.

  The message was rejected because the other end's SMTP server did not identify itself with a valid hostname.

  The sender's administrator can fix this easily. The sender's admin should create a hostname to match the host, or configure their email server to identify itself with a real hostname. Any customer or remote user can supply us with full headers of a bounced message by fax or email, and we can help pinpoint what should be fixed, and/or provide free and valuable advice for the other administrator on fixing this.

  Our previous mailserver was lax about the rule, and it resulted in needless spam coming in because spammers don't follow any rules for operating email servers. Prior mailservers we've operated have been both lax and properly enforcing of this, so this is not a completely new change. Enforcing this rules greatly reduces the amount of incoming spam.

• Nov 19, 2003 2:30pm. For about 15 minutes, some people had trouble dialing 1-500-699-7200. This was due to an equipment problem that has been fixed.
• Nov 17, 2003 During the day today, some customers with usernames starting with a-h had delays in email coming in. This was due to a large quantity of email coming in that our new server arrangement was not ideally tuned for. An additional server was added today to fix that and things are working without delay now.
• Nov 13, 2003 4:30-6:30am. the mailserver for midcoast.com will be upgraded. This should not affect surfing during this time. During a portion of this time, you may not be able to send email.
• Nov 5, 2003 4:00pm-5:00pm. A connectivity problem internal to one of our backbone link providers made many things slow starting at about 4:00pm. We shut this backbone link off and things cleared up by taking a different (working) route. We'll enable that backbone link when they have things fixed.