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 email with a score over 7.00 is most likely SPAM. The second thing it can optionally do is automatically delete any email that has higher score than a specified value. This is before the email is passed on, but it is permanent – an email detected as SPAM and automatically deleted is not recoverable.

When we forward on all email from a DecaTech email account to an external service, we are invariably also passing on SPAM. This SPAM does not originate or have anything to do with DecaTech’s webserver, but to the external email service, it appears like DecaTech is sending SPAM! To avoid getting black-listed (which usually leads to getting blocked) by companies like Google, Yahoo!, and Comcast, we need to step up our efforts to not pass on SPAM, whenever and however it can be helped.

Thus, we reach the DecaTech Email policy change:

If you have us forward email from a DecaTech email account, we must enable the SpamAssassin feature that deletes all detected SPAM. If you have any concerns about false positives – you can have us bump up the SPAM score a bit, but to no more than 8.0. A false positive is where an email is incorrectly marked as SPAM. You can check on this process now in two ways – look for emails that we have marked in the subject line with “**SPAM** (<score>)” or look at your regular email header.

For example, in Gmail, when viewing a specific email, click on the down arrow next to the “Reply” button and choose “Show original”. Look for a line in the email headers that looks like this:

X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.4 required=7.8 tests=AWL,BAYES_00,
	FH_DATE_PAST_20XX,HTML_MESSAGE autolearn=no version=3.2.4

The score in this example is 0.4, which basically means that the likelihood that this particular email is SPAM is extremely low.  You can also see that SpamAssassin was set to mark it as SPAM only if the value was higher than 7.8.

If you have any questions, or would like us to modify the SPAM detection value to something other than 7.0, please email DecaTech Support.

New Features:

* More accurate tracking
* Monitor your entire website via one report
* More detailed information

For those clients that utilize the WordPress blogging software, there is an exciting new version in the works that will be released by the end of November. The last few WordPress upgrades have been security updates – great for the health of our web server, but not too exciting for website owners. This release is something to get excited about for blog owners.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Improved Admin interface
• One-click plugin installs
• Sticky posts
• Comment threading and paging
• Theme update API (receive automatic notifications)
• Batch editing of posts
• Reply to comments from Admin area

We’re currently testing the 2.7 release candidate 3, and when the final version is released, we’ll be updating all WordPress blogs and sending out notice.

All DecaTech hosted WordPress blogs have been upgraded to this new version as of Sunday night, March 30th.

Note: You may have to perform a one-button click database upgrade. If you see a page like this after logging into your admin interface -

just click on Upgrade WordPress. It should automatically update your database and after a few seconds you’ll be able to continue back to your upgraded admin interface. If you experience any issues, please contact DecaTech Support.

Try it out – the new, easy to use interface just might encourage you to write more with your blog!

You can read all the details about this new version of WordPress here:

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-brecker/

Here are some of the highlights:

• Simplified and customizable admin dashboard
• Multi-file uploads
• Built-in image galleries
• One-click plugin upgrades
• Improved tag management
• Built-in Gravatars (think AIM icons)
• Faster load times

We’re currently testing the 2.5 release candidate 1, and when the final version is released, we’ll be updating all WordPress blogs and sending out notice.