Our web server has been updated to Apache 2.4.6.  Apache 2.4.5 was skipped because it was never released.

I’ve compiled SpamAssasin’s system-wide rules.  I tested from a gmail account to check delivery times.  Before it took 35 seconds for gmail mail to be delivered to a local mailbox.  Compiling the SpamAssassin system-wide rules reduced that to 5 seconds.

I have SSL working on the main web server.  You won’t see a lock on everything, even if you go there with https, because there is insecure data included such as the counter from histats, on some pages and that prevents your browser from showing a lock on those pages.

I have secured webmail, forums, and the new user application for shells.  It will take a bit to get everything secure but at least where you enter sensitive data it is in most places now.

Also, now that this is working, those of you who have virtual domains, if you want SSL on your virtual domain, this is something I can provide for you.  You will only need to purchase an SSL certificate and I will install it for you.

I’m still in the process of trying to get SSL to work properly on the web server.  In the process, I found out how to make ~user directories not show up on virtual domains so that is fixed now.

This may have unintended consequences if you are using CGI’s in your cgi-bin directory from your domain.  If so let me know and I’ll make necessary adjustments to your domain.

I will be doing some maintenance activity today that may result in very brief interruptions (less than one minute) and then just after midnight rebooting servers to make software updates go into effect, particular an update to glibc which is a standard library used by virtually all C programs (which is almost everything).

The reboots will take place between 12:05AM and 12:30am on July 14th, 2013.Those of you who have background tasks running on the shell server that do not restart automatically will need to restart them after the reboots.

Bayesian spam filtering (spam filters that LEARN what is spam and what is not based upon examples YOU send to them) are now implemented system wide.

Please send any spam you receive that isn’t properly classified as spam to: spamtrap@eskimo.com.  You can also send any other examples of spam to this address to help train the filters.

To properly function these filters also need examples of ‘ham’, non-spam.  Please send any copies of legitimate mail that get placed in your spam box or just any other legitimate mail you would like to make sure never gets improperly translated as spam to hamtrap@eskimo.com.  Please note, ham can ONLY be sent from eskimo accounts but spam can spam can be sent from anywhere.

For those of you who have WordPress blogs (or other web applications that can benefit from caching), we have memcached installed on the web server.

To take advantage of it, WordPress needs a plugin, and although there are many that are available, unless you like endlessly fiddling with configurations to get things to work, I recommend “Tribe Object Cache” because it is very simple to install and it is also effective at improving overall speed of your WordPress blog or other applications that are able to take advantage of memcached.

To install Tribe Object Cache on your WordPress blog, all you have to do is go to the Dashbord, select Plugins, and then Select “Add New”.  In the Search box put the words “tribe cache” and it will be the first thing to show up.  Select install tribe object cache now, and then activate tribe object cache now, and that’s it!

This will cause various objects to be cached in memory speeding up your blog or other memcached enabled web application.

I’ve been working hard over the last year to upgrade and update the infrastructure.  New web and ftp servers, new shell servers, entirely new mail infrastructure, new DNS servers, a move to a new co-location facility.

The new shell server supports a graphical user interface, is much faster than the old servers, and much more robust and stable.  It has a far richer set of applications than the old.  I’ve increased the standard disk quota from 400MB to 1GB.

The new mail servers allow encrypted sessions from customers (SSL or TLS) and when they connect to remote sites that also have TLS capability, they send and receive e-mail over the Internet TLS encrypted.  We allow up to 50MB of attachments though not all remote sites will receive attachments that large.

We’ve fixed many problems such as the inability to initiate a pop-3 session if you are at quota, or problems that resulted when your e-mail as accessed via multiple devices.

We’ve greatly enhanced the spam filtering and changed things so that spam is now kept in your spam folder rather than rejected giving you the option of reviewing it in the event expected mail does not arrive.  You now have the ability to configure spam filtering individually, to whitelist or blacklist addresses or domains, to set the sensitivity of spam filtering, or to adjust individual rules.

The new client mail server allows multiple imap sessions from multiple devices concurrently.

Our mail service allows you to receive e-mail by webmail, shell mailers, imap, or pop and you can freely switch between the different methods at your convenience.

No longer are we suffering the service outages of the past, web and mail are now stable.

In spite of all these things, I’m not seeing an increase in new users, and to survive long term, I need to increase the user base.  Also, from a purely personal standpoint, I really miss the old days when we had a pretty strong local community here.

So, please, tell me what you need to make Eskimo valuable for you and that would help you feel good about telling new potential customers about us.

You can leave comments here, post on our Forums at http://www.eskimo.com/bbs, or e-mail support.  I’d really appreciate it if you’d post on the forums as I’d like to get a good discussion going so that the future of Eskimo can be driven by your needs and desires.

New server for customer virtual servers is not behaving and now I am waiting on new RAM to arrive, expect that to happen about mid-July, then will be testing for several days to make sure it really fixes the problem.

Bayesian filtering for spamassassin system-wide, working on that, don’t have an ETA just yet but soon.

Working on upgrading the radius servers.  These really won’t affect service greatly as they are only used for dialup and DSL authentication but they and two shell servers (eskimo.com and shell.eskimo.com) are all that remain on old hardware and I’m trying to phase the rest of the old stuff out as it is  unmaintainable.

Also working on finding software that will run on the current platform to handle accounting as I’m also doing that on an old machine.

New help files for mail are in the works, I’ve taken screen shots for several common mailers (Outlook Express, Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, and Thunderbird) and
am working on new web pages to replace the current out of date pages.

Working on getting the main web server SSL enabled, support is compiled in but working to get ‘www.eskimo.com’ certificate in place and configured properly.

After I get the website SSL enabled, I am going to work on adding ability for customers to do things like alter spam settings, check quota, account status, etc, online.

Once I get SSL working for our website it will also be an option for customers with virtual domains or web hosting plans here.

Generally working towards bringing the entire website to HTML5 compliance.

These are some of the projects currently in the works just to let you folks all know what is in progress.