I’ve changed the system procmail rules as follows:

DROPPRIVS=yes
MAILDIR=$HOME/mail
INCLUDERC=/etc/mail/spamassassin/spamassassin-default.rc
:0:
* ? test ! -f $HOME/.procmailrc
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
spam

The reason for this change is so the system procmail rules won’t put mail scored as spam in a spam folder with giving user procmail rules a chance to override.

If you have a .procmailrc file and want mail scored as spam to go into a spam folder, then you need a rule like this:

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
spam

If you’d rather have mail that scores as spam discarded, then you need a rule like this:

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
/dev/null

If you have no .profmailrc file, then the default behavior is still to put mail marked as spam in your spam folder.

On the very first Unix version of Eskimo running Xenix on a Tandy 16B, then later Tandy 6000, and on our SunOS shell server eskimo.com, we had a number of BSD text based games such as adventure, hack, phantasia, etc.

I have installed on shellx, a BSD game package that makes many of these available again.  They are located in /usr/games and to run them you need to add /usr/games to your $PATH variable.  You can do this by adding to your .profile or .kshrc or other appropriate shell start up file:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/games

This is a list of available games:

---x--s--x 1 games 178794 May 22 17:04 adventure
---x--s--x 1 games  20925 May 22 17:04 arithmetic
---x--s--x 1 games 132577 May 22 17:04 atc
---x--s--x 1 games 123623 May 22 17:04 backgammon
---x--s--x 1 games 247737 May 22 17:04 battlestar
---x--s--x 1 games  14026 May 22 17:04 bcd
---x--s--x 1 games  13112 May 22 17:04 caesar
---x--s--x 1 games  54952 May 22 17:04 canfield
---x--s--x 1 games  13289 May 22 17:04 cfscores
---x--s--x 1 games   3798 May 22 17:04 countmail
---x--s--x 1 games  24287 May 22 17:04 fish
---x--s--x 1 games 218013 Nov 10  2010 gtetrinet
---x--s--x 1 games 737118 May 22 17:04 hack
---x--s--x 1 games  36197 May 22 17:04 hangman
---x--s--x 1 games  67689 May 22 17:04 hunt
---x--s--x 1 games 124320 May 22 17:04 huntd
---x--s--x 1 games  85703 May 22 17:04 mille
---x--s--x 1 games  96662 May 22 17:04 monop
---x--s--x 1 games  15821 May 22 17:04 morse
---x--s--x 1 games  18387 May 22 17:04 number
---x--s--x 1 games 156762 May 22 17:04 phantasia
---x--s--x 1 games  14437 May 22 17:04 pig
---x--s--x 1 games  19492 May 22 17:04 pom
---x--s--x 1 games  14231 May 22 17:04 ppt
---x--s--x 1 games  85412 May 22 17:04 primes
---x--s--x 1 games  34484 May 22 17:04 quiz
---x--s--x 1 games  17422 May 22 17:04 rain
---x--s--x 1 games  14351 May 22 17:04 random
---x--s--x 1 games  72454 May 22 17:04 robots
---x--s--x 1 games   2001 May 22 17:04 rot13
---x--s--x 1 games 213871 May 22 17:04 sail
---x--s--x 1 games  41302 May 22 17:04 snake
---x--s--x 1 games  12627 May 22 17:04 snscore
---x--s--x 1 games 123297 May 22 17:04 teachgammon
---x--s--x 1 games  57680 May 22 17:04 tetris-bsd
---x--s--x 1 games 225757 May 22 17:04 trek
---x--s--x 1 games   2157 May 22 17:04 wargames
---x--s--x 1 games  23860 May 22 17:04 worm
---x--s--x 1 games  22285 May 22 17:04 worms
---x--s--x 1 games   1166 May 22 17:04 wtf
---x--s--x 1 games  36197 May 22 17:04 wump

Prozilla, a file transfer program that tends to do better in terms of transfer speeds than most, is now available on shellx.  This would be used for grabbing something from a remote site and bringing it to shellx efficiently.

Prozilla has the ability to make multiple connections to multiple servers and download from all of them to obtain better speeds than any one of them might provide.

The command is ‘proz’, you can type ‘proz –help’ to see a list of options, or ‘man proz’ to get a manual page from the command line.

Presently, this only effects *@eskimo.com addresses.  I have not yet moved *@eskimo.net and hosted domains to the new system.

The daemonized version of spam assassin was not working as documented.  In particular, it rejected anything above the spam threshold rather than tagging and it did not read user preference files.

I’ve totally changed how spamassassin is “wired in” to the mail system now.  Instead of using a milter that talked to spamd, spamassassin is now being called by procmail for ever incoming mail, it tags it, then anything above the spam threshold is placed in a ‘spam’ mailbox.

In your directory there will be a subdirectory called .spamassassin, and in it a file called user_prefs.  By editing this file, you can change the threshold score, whitelist or blacklist users, or change any spamassassin rules.

If you find this directory not owned by you, please contact support and we will fix that.  Some files were created with the wrong permissions early on.

Isomedia is doing network maintenance May 16th between midnight and 4AM which may briefly interrupt connectivity to our equipment at the co-location facility.  Any interruption that may occur should not last more than a few minutes.  Please avoid scheduling any critical activities during this time frame.

We will soon be offering servers for lease.  These will be virtual machines using KVM under CentOS 6.4, running a guest OS of CentOS 6.4.  These will basically be exactly the same platform as the web, ftp server, and shellx shell server here (and other services are being moved to this platform).

All the details haven’t been decided yet, but basically this will offer you the capability of having a server for your own needs, upon which you have root access and can configure however you like within the bounds of the IP addresses provided and that it not be used for anything illegal or unethical or negatively impact customer service such as things which continuously consume CPU such as bitcoin mining, seti@home, etc.

We will not be allowing public IRC servers for the time being because of their tendency to draw denial of service attacks that interfere with all other services, but games, e-commerce, most other applications will be allowed.

Things like MMORPGs, E-commerce, your own web hosting setup, etc, will be okay.  I would very much like your ideas and comments concerning this in the early stages so that I can design the product around your needs.

Business and Personal web hosting plans have been changed.

I created these plans with a transfer quota after which there were charges for data export because we have costs for data transferred and at the lower costs of these plans verses virtual domains, I couldn’t just work the averages like we do with virtual domains.

I realize this creates an uncertainty that many people are uncomfortable with, so I’ve changed the terms of these plans so that rather than having a potentially huge data export fee, you will only be required to upgrade to a plan that will support the amount of traffic your site generates in the event your traffic exceeds the plans data quota.

We haven’t had a single unplanned outage of the web service since replacing the server back on December 7th, 2012 and the machine is fast, has current software, and quite a few capabilities.  I had really expected web hosting sales to be better.  I am hoping this change will help.

If there are other capabilities that we lack that are important to your needs, please contact us at support@eskimo.com or on our forum or BBS, or even use the comments here, and let me know.

I am still working out configuration issues with the first of three new mail servers.

Today I discovered that I had neglected to specify a maximum message size so Postfix defaulted to 10MB.  We had the old server set to 50MB, and I’ve now corrected this.

Some of you are posting on Yahoo Groups.  I am restricted from using social media at present and so I can not view or respond to those posts there.

Please bring your mail and other service concerns to my attention by either e-mailing support@eskimo.com or giving us a call at 1-800-246-6874, or 206-812-0051.  You can also visit our web forum at http://www.eskimo.com/forums.

When you have a problem with e-mail, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not send generic messages like “email is being blocked”, or all my friends can’t e-mail me.  E-mail problems are almost always specific to addresses or at the very least specific servers and when logs show we’ve processed 2 million messages a day successfully, then a statement that e-mail isn’t working is not meaningful.

Instead, please provide the “From:” and “To:” addresses, the date the problem occurred, and if you got a bounce message, what the message said.  This will allow me to determine what the problem is and if it’s on our end, to fix it, and if it’s not on our end, to forward the necessary information to the originating site for them to be able to fix it.

Last year I replaced our web server, and initially we had some configuration issues like these to nail down.  I’d like to point out that they were resolved and we haven’t had a single web outage since.  The same will be true of mail once these issues are worked out, but switching to an entirely different hardware and software platform is not without it’s challenges.