This week we have reached 0 support queries in the support que a number of times. The new control panel is reducing the amount of support queries - giving customers more direct control of their web hosting account. This has been a major goal for us in the development of the new control panel. If this does not happen for you and the control panel does not do what it should, please email a description of what you did, what you wanted to do and what happened to support@m6.net (bugs are now going through our support system)

Some customers have been experiencing a situation where their email address is used as the reply address in spam emails. It is easy for anyone that knows your email address to use is as a reply address for their spam and "hijack" your email address. They simply use spam sending software that acts as a mail server on the spammers computer. They send out spam with your email as the reply address and your mailbox receives all the bounce backs, failed messages and abuse. Anyone can do this without ever going anywhere near your mail server. There is nothing that your provider or we can do about it - as they never have to use our servers to exploit it.

However, if this does happen to you, do notify us so we can have it on record and let our network providers and spam blacklists know it is an email hijacking. You can also filter offending emails directly on your mail server so they are not received in your mail box. There is a very powerful feature in SmarterMail that will allow you to set rules to automatically delete emails and bouncebacks you receive if you are hijacked (or for any other reason). Simply login to your SmarterMail mail server and from the Settings Menu, select Domain Filtering. Click the Add Filter button and you will see a range of options to set, to automatically delete offending emails before it reaches your inbox. Domain filtering will set the rule for the entire domain (affects all mail boxes). You can use My Content Filtering (on the Settings menu) to only filter emails for the mailbox you logged into.

A week ago Microsoft released .Net Framework 2.0 with, to anyone not actively watching .Net development, a minimum of fanfare. Our automation system, the control panel and a significant number of our in-house tools all rely on .Net - not to mention the hundreds of bits of ASP.Net (.Net 1.1) web pages running on our servers - a single memory leak or bug has the potential to bring all that crashing down. Many of you are likely to be running .Net 1.1 code and installing .Net 2.0 without proper investigation could have a lot of your code stop working. As the product is barely a week old, with little history on production machines, I'm reluctant to push out an upgrade right away. I will, however, be doing a rollout onto our new web servers as they are provisioned, so opportunities will exist for those who just have to have .Net 2.0.

In other Network Ops news, we have finished setting up the new mail server I promised a fortnight ago, which will reduce the load on our current active mail servers. We also had a couple of issues with a database server nearing the end of last week, for which I am very grateful for everyone's patience - the machine had some initial software issues that quickly snowballed into a reload of the Operating System, but everything was back by the weekend, and no one's data went missing, so things are now completely back to normal.

Since last week the support team is being successful in providing support responses within a time of 1-3 hours. However, our ultimate goal is to provide instant support, which we hope to be able to achieve with ongoing improvements and training. Support is an area which constantly needs training and knowledge of the latest technology. I would really appreciate it, if we can get feedback and new ideas from you in which we can improve. If you have any new ideas and ways in which you think that your hosting company should be updated about, then please email them to kunalk@m6.net

Tip of the Week: For all those using form mails in ASP.Net, there is a way in which you do not need to mention any SMTP server address. There is a class called as MailMessage which uses a SmtpMail.Send (object) to send messages and uses by default the web server SMTP address. I have tried it myself and it works great.

Michael Guilfoyle Director		0 Support Queries and Hijacked emails?
Michael Guilfoyle Director		This week we have reached 0 support queries in the support que a number of times. The new control panel is reducing the amount of support queries - giving customers more direct control of their web hosting account. This has been a major goal for us in the development of the new control panel. If this does not happen for you and the control panel does not do what it should, please email a description of what you did, what you wanted to do and what happened to support@m6.net (bugs are now going through our support system) Some customers have been experiencing a situation where their email address is used as the reply address in spam emails. It is easy for anyone that knows your email address to use is as a reply address for their spam and "hijack" your email address. They simply use spam sending software that acts as a mail server on the spammers computer. They send out spam with your email as the reply address and your mailbox receives all the bounce backs, failed messages and abuse. Anyone can do this without ever going anywhere near your mail server. There is nothing that your provider or we can do about it - as they never have to use our servers to exploit it. However, if this does happen to you, do notify us so we can have it on record and let our network providers and spam blacklists know it is an email hijacking. You can also filter offending emails directly on your mail server so they are not received in your mail box. There is a very powerful feature in SmarterMail that will allow you to set rules to automatically delete emails and bouncebacks you receive if you are hijacked (or for any other reason). Simply login to your SmarterMail mail server and from the Settings Menu, select Domain Filtering. Click the Add Filter button and you will see a range of options to set, to automatically delete offending emails before it reaches your inbox. Domain filtering will set the rule for the entire domain (affects all mail boxes). You can use My Content Filtering (on the Settings menu) to only filter emails for the mailbox you logged into.

Bob Watson Network Operations		Network Administration
Bob Watson Network Operations		A week ago Microsoft released .Net Framework 2.0 with, to anyone not actively watching .Net development, a minimum of fanfare. Our automation system, the control panel and a significant number of our in-house tools all rely on .Net - not to mention the hundreds of bits of ASP.Net (.Net 1.1) web pages running on our servers - a single memory leak or bug has the potential to bring all that crashing down. Many of you are likely to be running .Net 1.1 code and installing .Net 2.0 without proper investigation could have a lot of your code stop working. As the product is barely a week old, with little history on production machines, I'm reluctant to push out an upgrade right away. I will, however, be doing a rollout onto our new web servers as they are provisioned, so opportunities will exist for those who just have to have .Net 2.0. In other Network Ops news, we have finished setting up the new mail server I promised a fortnight ago, which will reduce the load on our current active mail servers. We also had a couple of issues with a database server nearing the end of last week, for which I am very grateful for everyone's patience - the machine had some initial software issues that quickly snowballed into a reload of the Operating System, but everything was back by the weekend, and no one's data went missing, so things are now completely back to normal.

Kunal Kochlar Support Coordinator		Support and Customer Service
Kunal Kochlar Support Coordinator		Since last week the support team is being successful in providing support responses within a time of 1-3 hours. However, our ultimate goal is to provide instant support, which we hope to be able to achieve with ongoing improvements and training. Support is an area which constantly needs training and knowledge of the latest technology. I would really appreciate it, if we can get feedback and new ideas from you in which we can improve. If you have any new ideas and ways in which you think that your hosting company should be updated about, then please email them to kunalk@m6.net Tip of the Week: For all those using form mails in ASP.Net, there is a way in which you do not need to mention any SMTP server address. There is a class called as MailMessage which uses a SmtpMail.Send (object) to send messages and uses by default the web server SMTP address. I have tried it myself and it works great.

Michael Nordling Chief Software Engineer		Development and New Technology
Michael Nordling Chief Software Engineer		Hi everyone, the past week we have continued to work on the control panel that most of you now have seen. You would have seen some small changes this week in the user interface and Daniel has updated the manual too for the copanel which you all can browse through. Just click on "What do I do" in the menu and you will be able to browse it. If you find any problems with it or anything else you would like to have explained or explained better then you can just contact us. If you have any problems with anything just write an email to support@m6.net or use the controlpanel to submit a bug report, by choosing "control panel" in the drop down list.

0 Support Queries and Hijacked emails?