Mail service changes
Since September, the spam load on agora has jumped dramatically, with the result that the mail system has been faltering. To deal with the onslaught, a couple of changes have been made:
- I’ve made arrangements with Peak Internet, the ISP I work full time for, to use their spam filter, a Barracuda Spam Firewall 600 (actually, a pair clustered to look like one). This does a very effective job, with only a few annoyances. For more info, there is some documentation, and you can see the current statistics.
One of the things the barracuda is bad about is that users can’t manage their passwords. It wouldn’t be good to flood Peak with calls to set them to something known (they shouldn’t be called about anything rdrop related), so I’ll handle it as needed. It actually shouldn’t be necessary: When you get your daily quarantine notice (assuming you have something quarantined, but that’s almost a given), there will be a “click here” link at the bottom of the message. That will, for about a day, work to get you into it and you can twiddle things from there.
Note that because the barracuda is a separate, independent, system, it can’t tell what addresses are aliased to the same mailbox, so each email address you use will be managed separately. That’s one of the other things I plan to fix when I get a new one built… (I plan to build my own eventually to fix some of the shortcomings of the Barracuda).
- To keep spammers from going directly to the mail server and bypassing the spam filter, as well as to start the move to a new, updated, mail server, I’ve put a block so that only the spam filter can send mail into the rdrop mail servers. For similar reasons, the new dialup service blocks standard mail access, so users need to update their outgoing mail server configuration. I have documentation for configuring Outlook to help, though I still need to update it: for now, change references to
smtp.rdrop.comtovmail.rdrop.com, andport 25toport 465. You will also want to visit a page to install a new certificate so your mail program will trust the new mail server. NOTE: If you have trouble logging intovmail.rdrop.com, go to the User Account Management page and reset your password. Some accounts have an old format password that the new system doesn’t understand, and this will update it to the new format. Be sure to use a good password — spammers are getting really sophisticated and cracking accounts so they can send authenticated spam using hijacked accounts.
I’ll be moving incoming mail to vmail early next year, but I’ll have updated docs and separate info for that change…