Integration notes for status of Internet Partners & seasurf Integration CURRENT NEWS 11-9-2006 Replacement "spamate" interface installed and setup instructions for it were posted to the front page of the website. Note, if you want mail migrated from saved webmail folders on the old mailserver to webmail folders on the new server, please e-mail us. I'll be doing those on a request basis. I'll need the userID you used to login with, and the names of the folders you want migrated. CURRENT NEWS 11-7-2006 We are still seeing a number of log entries on the mailserver for users that are failing to login. Most of these login failures are from e-mail boxes that we have no record of. To repeat, if your mailbox is not in our billing system it will not have been added. One very good indicator is to go to your last bill from us. If that bill does not list a user ID for your mailbox, then it is not in our accounting system and won't be on the new mailserver. If you haven't EVER gotten a bill from us then the mailbox won't be on the server and even if we see attempts to access it, it will not be added to the server. A number of people with mailboxes on the old server wern't getting billed at all from Seasurf. If you have an old account that you cancelled months ago, or let lapse for non payment, then the mailbox will also not be on the new server. A surprising number of mailboxes for old cancelled accounts were on the old server, and were never removed. These are also not present on the new server. For accounts that are on the server that have password mismatches, (due to the case-sensitivity problem discussed on prior notices) some people are having problems accessing these accounts because they are changing their passwords. They will access the mailserver and the access fails, but instead of waiting they will try different case-sensitive permutations of the password, hoping to hit on the password by chance. If they had waited, and tried the original password, they would have found it working, since we would have reset the server password by then. At this point the best thing to do if your still having problems accessing mail is to call our office. Either the username/password pair is messed up, or the account isn't on the server because we have no accounting record of it and we would need to talk to you anyway. CURRENT NEWS 11-6-2006 Some users are still having problems logging into the new mailserver. The problem is that the old mailserver lowercased all of the user passwords. If, for example, your password was "GEnE" then the old server would have accepted "gene" or "GENE" or any combination of upper and lowercase letters as a password. The server stored passwords internally as all lowercase then when it got a password from someone logging in, it would make it all lowercase before doing the comparison. To say that this came as a surprise is a huge understatement. Ignoring case on passwords is a security hole and only very old, old, computer systems ever did this. The last system I ever worked with that did this was shut down back in the late 1980s. All of the software packages used on the old mailserver are known to be case-sensitive for passwords. The old server had to have been deliberately patched to do this. The new mailserver is case-sensitive for passwords. The problem is that when we created the mailboxes we used the list of passwords that was in the old mailserver. We had thought it was a bit strange that all the passwords were lowercased but didn't think anything beyond this. Some users are using mixed-case passwords, and so will not authenticate in. If you are using mixed-case passwords please don't change them. We are logging all access to the new server and case-misalignment is one of the things we are looking for, and we will change the password on the server to match what your sending us. We do not want people to change from a more secure mixed case password to a less-secure single case password CURRENT NEWS 11-5-2006 Some users have asked about old address books and e-mail from the Seasurf webmail system. We have provided a link from the main Seasurf web page to login to the old system. Please keep in mind that this system is running on hardware that was not included in the sale of Seasurf and will be carted away in February of 2007. We strongly recommend you make a backup of your personal address book to your home PC before entering it into the new webinterface. We will not be migrating any personal address books or preferences. if you have significant amounts of old mail that you want to retain for historical reasons, we may be able to migrate this for you from the old system to the new system on an individual basis. Please e-mail us about this. CURRENT NEWS 11-4-2006 Some users that are unable to login to the webinterface for the e-mail system may be using their complete e-mail address as the userID, rather than their account name. For most people, the account ID is the first part of the e-mail address and should be used - for example if your e-mail address is "support@seasurf.net" you should use a username of "support" to login to the webinterface, NOT a username of "support@seasurf.net" The old system didn't care it would take the login either way, the new system does care. CURRENT NEWS 11-3-2006 We are operating on the new mailserver at this point. Note that there are always some teething issues. If you are unable to login to the new mailserver for any reason, please be aware that we are monitoring the server logs for failed login attempts and when we see them, we will investigate to see if there is some problem that can be corrected at the server side. Please try again later as we may have corrected the problem. You can also go to this URL: http://info.ipinc.net/ipinc/contact.asp and submit a trouble ticket, we are monitoring these very closely as well. You can contact us by phone at 503-738-3844 If it is after business hours then you can leave a message, we will be checking these also. Note that if your mailbox is NOT listed on your quarterly bill then it is very unlikely that it will be present on the server, you will need to contact us. We did not migrate mailboxes that we had no billing records for. We expect to have all initial issues corrected by end of day Monday 11-6-2006 Note also that next week we will begin adding users to the new personal spam whitelist/blacklist system. If you want to be on this system (similar to the old spamate system) then send us an e-mail. Note also that the webmail interface URL has changed, please update your bookmarks The webmail software has been updated also. You can access any old mail on the old mailserver from the Old Webinterface link on the main Seasurf website. Due to the nature of DNS propagation on the Internet, you may continue to get some mail there for another day or two. Thank you for your patience! NEW NEWS: new server hardware mail.seasurf.net has been built, cutover will take place Wednesday evening/Thursday morning Nov 1st 2nd 2006 Check here for irreular updates to the status of the Seasurf and Internet Partners, Inc. integration project ) Updated router and switch equipment at Seaside NOC - ROUTER IN PROCESS, SWITCH COMPLETE ) Installed primary and secondary nameservers & moved all domains over - IN PROCESS ) Partial renumbering of Seasurf network - COMPLETE ) Disconnect of Cogent Co circuit - COMPLETE ) Rehomed Seasurf ISP webpage & completed initial mods - COMPLETE ) Rehomed all customer websites - IN PROCESS ) Replaced spam prefilter mailserver - IN PROCESS ) Replaced hardware mail.seasurf.net - IN PROCESS ) Unified dialup auth so customers can dial into both PDX and SEA - NOT STARTED ) Access from IP webmail to Seasurf - COMPLETE ) Review of dialup accellerator software - NOT STARTED ) Rehome of customer personal home webpages - COMPLETE ) Corrected all billing issues - IN PROCESS Explanation of September e-mail changes at Seasurf Seasurf was purchased July 28th On August 31st the Seasurf spam-scanning mailserver that had the quarentine software in it crashed so badly that part of the filesystem of the server itself was gone. When we investigated this we discovered that this kind of crash was a -regular-!!! occurance and what the previous admin at Seasurf had been doing was just reloading from backups whenever the server crashed. Which was about every 3 weeks. I guess the network gods gave us an extra week of life on the thing, seeing as how we were new owners. :-/ Anyway, we have more regard for customer mail than that. We let the server stay dead. R.I.P. In the meantime since spam scanning was required, we temporarily redirected the incoming mail to seasurf through the IP mailserver. That server both scans and runs the mailboxes for Internet Partners. It does not have a quarentine in the same way that the Seasurf mailserver did. Instead it tags the mail as spam, if it thinks it's spam. Then it delivers everything. This server does have a user interface, similar to the old "spamate" interface on Seasurf, that allows users to define custom whitelists, and the level of spam filtering. However due to certain technical issues with regards to duplication of names of e-mail addresses on both servers, this interface isn't useable by all mail system users. This is not a problem if your connected via DSL because you can set your e-mail program to auto-delete anything tagged as spam, in your filters. It is a problem if your a dialup user since you have to download the mail in order to delete it, and we recognize this. The simple answer would be to immediately move all Seasuf users on to the Internet Partners mailserver. Alas, this cannot be since the Seasurf mailserver authentication uses realms. The Internet Partners mailserver does not. Thus we absolutely must build and maintain a separate Seasurf mailserver, permanently. Unfortuantely we did not discover all of this until after the Seasurf mailserver problems. When planning this server we had to look at several issues: 1) Basic requirements. Antivirus and spam scanning is a requirement for any modern mailserver due to the spam load. It is also a requirement that these items be implemented so as to be easily upgradable. 2) Quarentining. There's no question that dialup users can benefit from a quarentine. DSL users do not, since DSL is fast enough to be able to dowload all mail. This is the same issue as for dialup accelleration - that is another program that only dialup users benefit from, that DSL users do not. 3) Efficiency. Spam today vastly outnumbers regular mail. The ratio is something like 100 spam messages are transmitted vs 1 legitimate message. Thus, schemes like a global quarentine prgram force the server to spend 100 times the amount of CPU time processing spam than processing legitimate mail. It is in fact worse than that since a global quarentine creates a huge demand just to manage the quarentine. 4) Fairness. Some people are protective of their e-mail address, they only share it with close friends, family members, etc. Others are very sloppy, and put their mail address on unprotected web pages instead of using e-mail webforms that conceal the address, use it in online forums like Craigslist, or Usenet News or on mailing lists, etc. As a result, in a normal mailserver the people who are careful with their addresses get little spam, and the people who are not, get a lot of spam. This creates a situation where the sloppy e-mail users consume the lions share of mailserver resources, and the careful users are penalized. Non-quarentine schemes penalize the people that get a lot of spam, because they force the user to spend their own CPU time deleting it, via e-mail filters and such. Quarentine schemes, by contrast, reward sloppy e-mail address handling. This is in fact, most likely the one reason the Seasurf mailserver finally melted down - it's disks were literally beaten to death. 5) Reliability. E-mail is an important tool and it is no good if users do not get the messages they are expecting. Thus the server must be built on solid hardware and carefully planned, and not quickly thrown together in response to some emergency - like a server crash. 6) Transparent. The new server must not require any changes on the mail clients, nor any action on behalf of customers, to start using it. We weighed all of these and have come up with a mailserver design we think fairly balances resources and needs without encouraging problems. THe new Seasurf mailserver, being built right now, is on server class rack mounted hardware, and it will replace both the Seasurf scanning mailserver and the Seasurf POP3 server. It will not have a global quarentine. Instead, ON REQUEST by a user, we will setup a mechanism on the server that will direct anything tagged as SPAM in the subject line addressed TO THAT USER to a spam folder FOR THAT USER ONLY. This is almost IDENTICAL to how Gmail operates, Gmail is one of the largest "free" mailservers on the Internet, so if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for us. The only difference in fact is that Gmail by default turns on this system for all users. We are only going to do it by request because we know that DSL users don't need it, nor do users that don't get much spam. The mails in these personal spam folders WILL NOT BE AUTO DELETED. It is the responsibility of the user to delete them from time to time to keep the folder from getting too big. If the user does not, we will remove the spam folder and turn off the auto-redirect. If a user finds a mail in there that isn't supposed to be tagged as spam, they can move it to their inbox via imap. The user can also opt instead of the auto redirect to simply have everything tagged as spam to be just deleted, rather than go to a spam folder. To access that spam folder the user must use an IMAP mail client. They must also change the login ID to "username" instead of "username@seasurf.net" We can assist in this change once the server is online. All of the modern mail clients, like Outlook, Netscape Messenger Apple Mail, and so on, are IMAP clients. This new server is planned to be online and operational by the end of September. This is less than a month to get it built and tested, and it will be difficult to meet that, but we think we can do it. OCTOBER UPDATE 10-15 The server has been built, is currently undergoing stress-testing, All of the names have not been moved over yet. We are planning on a move midweek of 10-18.