DecaTech Solutions News

Updated Email Forwarding Policy

June 30, 2010 – 12:29 pm
When you have your DecaTech hosted domain's email forwarded to an external email service like Yahoo!, Gmail or Comcast, your email comes into the DecaTech server, then is forwarded back out to your external email account. We all receive SPAM on a daily basis. It is unfortunately unavoidable. However, many of the aforementioned email services above have gotten pretty good at blocking a large percentage of it. DecaTech has an email filtering service called SpamAssassin in place that we rely on to cut down on SPAM as well. This is provided for free to all of our clients that utilize email service with us. This service does 2 things - thru complex algorithms it analyzes the email and assigns a "score" to it to identify the liklihood of it being SPAM. The higher the score, the more likely that it is SPAM. We've found (and its recommended by SpamAssassin) that any ...

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WordPress 3.0 Upgrade

June 18, 2010 – 2:21 pm
This week, Wordpress blogging software released their biggest major upgrade in several years. All DecaTech web hosting customers running WordPress blogs thru us will be automatically upgraded to this exciting new release over the weekend. Here's some of the highlights: new default theme - Twenty Ten new theme API's multiple blog capability lighter, more efficient user interface To find out more about this release, and its new features, check out: WordPress 3.0 "Thelonious" If you have any questions about this new version, please contact DecaTech Support.

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Email lagging behind by 2-3 hours today (SPAM attack)

June 9, 2010 – 1:09 pm
Just a general notice to DecaTech clients that we have been under an internet-wide SPAM attack today, and the server has been running a couple of hours behind due to this. I've put a few specific blockers in place that have helped, and email is starting to catch up again to real-time activity. If you are interested, this specific issue seems to be generating the majority of the attack: http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/new-spam-attack-abusing-amazon-apple-twitter-email-notification Also, our apologies for any confusion that the last couple of Blog notice emails sent out earlier this week may have caused. Both were blog posts from a month or more ago, but the outgoing notification messages were blocked due to a technical issue with the blog software.

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WARNING: “setting for your mailbox are changed” email is a fake

April 27, 2010 – 8:40 am
It has come to our attention that a new "fake" email that appears to be coming from DecaTech is being generated for some domains as of today. The email comes with a PDF attachment and is typically using a from address of your own domain, which is unfortunately easy to fake and nothing that we can do about that. The PDF itself does not appear to contain any known viruses, nor does it actually contain any actual information. It appears that the spammer or phisher is currently in an "experimenting" phase. As with any email of this nature, please feel free to contact DecaTech for assitance before making any suspicious changes or responding to something like this online. UPDATE: I've found out that the PDF does actually contain an embedded payload - DO NOT OPEN IT! More info, from another forum I found this morning: The PDF contains an embedded payload of two vbs ...

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Server outage – Power issues at Network Facility

March 15, 2010 – 3:47 pm
From approximately 7:15AM MDT until 9:40AM on the morning of March 15th, DecaTech clients experienced an interruption in web and mail service. The outage was a major power failure at the data center that the DecaTech server is housed at in Phoenix, AZ. The data center is designed to handle power outages, but this one went well above and beyond the capability of the data center, and let to an extended outage for our server and 100's of others. Thanks to the diligence of our network provider, they were able to restore our server as rapidly as possible. Here's a technical break-down of what happened from their perspective, for those that are interested: At approximately 8:00AM Central Time, utility power to our Phoenix data center and the surrounding area was cut. The City of Phoenix has not yetinformed us of what caused this issue. Upon failure of utility power,backup generator fired-up as ...

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Server Outage – apology and explanation

March 3, 2010 – 2:06 am
At approximately 2:00PM MT on Tuesday, March 1st... our server stopped being able to respond to requests for all domains that are hosted on it. Basically, the DNS service was down so access to domains for web and mail requests was down. The root cause was an unexpected reboot of the server by our network access provider at 1:53PM. The server had not been (nor had it needed to be) rebooted in over 4 months, so the behavior of the DNS service crashing on the server restart was an unexpected issue. Thru some automated scripts I have running, I was notified of the problem and temporarily resolved the problem around 2:45. After a few quick tests, the server appeared to be fully functional again. Unfortunately, the issue returned and the DNS service was down again, providing the same access issues as before. Our primary support was unable to look into the ...

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HitMonitor 2.0 – updated reporting for your domain

January 4, 2010 – 12:40 am
A new version of the weekly HitMonitor report is coming to your Inbox this week. New Features: * More accurate tracking * Monitor your entire website via one report * More detailed information

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WordPress 2.9 Upgrade

December 22, 2009 – 10:13 pm
All DecaTech Solutions hosting clients with WordPress blogs have been updated to the newest release of WordPress. To find out more about this release, and its new features, check out: WordPress version 2.9 "Carmen" If you don’t already have a WordPress blog, but are interested in blogging for your website or business – please contact DecaTech Sales to see if your current hosting plan includes free WordPress installation. If you have any questions about this new version, please contact DecaTech Support.

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WARNING: Phishing/Malware Attack via Email

October 27, 2009 – 6:16 pm
It has come to our attention that some DecaTech Clients are receiving the following message via email this week: Subject: Attention - Mail Server Upgrade Attention! On October 30, 2009 server upgrade will take place. Due to this the system may be offline for approximately half an hour. The changes will concern security, reliability and performance of mail service and the system as a whole. For compatibility of your browsers and mail clients with upgraded server software you should run SSl certificates update procedure. This procedure is quite simple. All you have to do is just to click the link provided, to save the patch file and then to run it from your computer location. That's all. http://updates.yourdomain.com.secure.mail-admins.net/mail/id=717904896791-email@yourdomain.com-patch882.aspx Thank you in advance for your attention to this matter and sorry for possible inconveniences. System Administrator Please note that this message is definitely NOT from DecaTech Solutions, and most likely contains malware that can harm your computer. If you ever receive a ...

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Outgoing Email Issue – RESOLVED

January 29, 2009 – 7:21 am
The issue with outgoing email has been resolved. Here's a full disclosure on what happened: At 4:46AM on Tuesday, January 27th, our upstream network provider started rejecting all outgoing email at their relay server During the course of the day, a few clients notified DecaTech Support and expressed a concern that some outgoing emails were not being received DecaTech Support confirmed the issue in the late afternoon and determined that it was unable to resolve the issue on the server At 9:30PM the network provider was notified of the issue. For the next 3-4 hours DecaTech Support continued to research the issue and provided the network provider with very specific details at 11:30AM on Wednesday, January 28th, email stopped being rejected by the relay server and started going out Through-out the course of that day, the large queue of email was sent out. Outgoing email returned to real-time at approximately 5:00PM. DecaTech Support was notified by the ...

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