Hosting error messages are specialised pages that appear when something goes awry for a website visitor.  The most common error is the 404, or in English, file cannot be found.  By default, when these errors occur with websites hosted by NamesAndSpace (N&S), the visitor will be taken to a simple error page with NamesAndSpace branding.

As of today (11th June), hosting error messages will now be handled through our support website, ACS Support.  For website owners, this change means that the number of steps required to contact our support team is reduced – with the new messages, you are already on our support website.  For website visitors, the context of the error messages remains unchanged.

Messages customised to your site

The majority of NamesAndSpace hosting packages included the  to specify custom error messages.  Hosting customers may be interested in creating messages that conform to their site’s design and/or to their own wording.   If you are interested in configuring custom error messages for your hosted website, please contact our support team who will be able to assist you further.

A side-effect of yesterday’s Internet Connectivity Issues was that our backup mail systems were subjected to a near 24 hour real world test, which they passed with flying colours.  All our Backup MXs performed exactly as intended without compromising the service availability for any of our mail customers even when running under loads of tens of thousands of messages.

What’s a Backup MX?

In the event of one of our primary mail servers going offline, all mail traffic is automatically transferred to one of our backup servers, called a Backup MX.  This switchover is seamless and is completely transparent to both the sender and the recipient.  The Backup MX will then store all incoming messages until such time that primary server is online again, at which point all messages are automatically sent to it.

All NamesAndSpace hosting accounts that include mail services automatically come with a Backup MX facility so that in the event of our the N&S mail server going offline, you don’t lose any messages.

Changes to Spam Filtering

At the peak of yesterday’s traffic,  our Backup MXs were storing in excess of 20,000 messages pending delivery.  Needless to say, the vast majority – more than 90% – of these were spam or junk mail.  In light of this, we are revising our spam filtering systems to purposefully intercept and eliminate a substantial proportion of spam messages before they reach individual e-mail accounts.

Our spam filtering systems work on a score-based.  Every message passing through our servers is subject to a series of checks, each of which is designed to test a particular aspect or property of the message for validity.  If a check fails, then the a value is added to the message’s spam score.  Once the score reaches a threshold value – the spam mark threshold – , the message is considered to be a spam or junk message.  If the score reaches a higher threshold value, then the message will automatically be deleted.

The changes we have implemented are two-fold.  Firstly, we have lowered the bar of the spam mark threshold.  This will have the effect of a higher proportion of messages being marked as being Spam.

The second change is more proactive.  One of the checks we employ is called a Blacklist Lookup where the address of the sending e-mail server for each message is checked against an online list of known spamming servers.  If the sender is a known spammer, then the message in question will now be automatically intercepted and deleted.

Since we implemented these changes last night, the amount of spam messages reaching individual mail boxes has reduced significantly.  These changes were not made solely in light of yesterday’s issues as we had been planning to introduce them in the near future.  If anything, yesterday merely served to accelerate their introduction.

False Positives

In the highly unlikely event you may believe that some valid messages are being marked as spam – otherwise known as a false positive – please contact our Support Team via http://www.acssupport.co.uk for further assistance.

As always, if you have queries regarding any product or service supported by ACS Limited, please do not hesitate to contact our Support Team via http://www.acssupport.co.uk.

We’re experiencing a few intermittent connectivity problems with our office Internet connection this morning.  This in turn is delaying some messages being sent to any e-mail address at appliedconsultancy.com.  At present, we believe these issues to transitory and will should be resolved shortly.

These connection issues do not impact nor affect our NamesAndSpace (N&S) hosting servers, nor any of our own websites like ACS Support. All of our N&S servers are located within resilient data centres that incorporate multiple levels of redundancy.

Update 14:35

We’re still experiencing internet connection problems at our office which is impacting on our incoming messages.  At the last count, there were over 3,000 messages still waiting to arrive (95% of which will be spam).  If you have any questions or queries, please submit them via our support website http://www.acssupport.co.uk which remains fully operational and unaffected by these problems.

Update Wednesday 10:00

The internet connectivity issues have now been resolved and all outstanding messages have now filtered through to our mail systems.  If you sent a message to any e-mail address at appliedconsultancy.com it should now be with the intended recipient.  As with out NamesAndSpace hosting accounts, all our e-mail systems utilise Backup MXs (mailservers) to ensure that no valid (see below) mail traffic is lost.

Following an internal review, we’ve decided to trim back on the number of fax number we currently have in use.

With immediate effect, the fax number to be used for all avenues of enquiry and contact (sales, accounts, support etc.) is 0871 714 3410. All faxes sent to this address will be redirect to the appropriate recipient at ACS. So, for support matters, the fax message is passed to our support team.

The old support fax number of 0871 714 5240 is no longer in use.

As before, we ask that wherever possible, all support enquiries and issues are reported via our support portal, ACS Support. Support requests issued by fax have a lower priority than those submitted via our Support website.

A faxable support form may be downloaded from http://support.appliedconsultancy.com/files/userfiles/file/supportfax.pdf.

Merry Christmas from everyone at ACS Limited.

We will be closing at 1300 today (Christmas Eve) and will not re-open until the 29th January.  We are operating restricted opening hours during the Christmas to New Year period.  Our support website will continue to operate over the festive period, and any submitted tickets will be attended to when we are open.

As per our Christmas & New Year Opening Hours, ACS will only be open from 0900 to 1300 on Christmas Eve. After this time, ACS will be closed until the 29th December when our support team will be available to answer your questions.

Please note that we are operating a Remote Support Only service between Christmas and the New Year. Our support website will continue to operate over the festive period, and any submitted tickets will be attended to when we are open.

During the Christmas to New Year period our support and technical team will be performing maintenance work on all of our NamesAndSpace (N&S) servers. Although we aim to minimise interruption to our services, there may short periods where one or more services will be unavailable. To check the status of our servers and their services, visit our live status feed at http://status.appliedconsultancy.com.

Advanced warning of service downtime will be announced on Reload, our Support & Development blog. Reload may be found at http://blogs.appliedconsultancy.com/reload.

We’re currently experiencing a few broadband issues at our office that in turn is impacting on our (ACS’) mail. Our support team is currently working to resolve this issue and are hopeful normal service will be resumed later today. If you have sent us a message, we apologise for the delay and we will reply as soon as our mail services return to normal.

This issue applies only to messages addressed to our domain, appliedconsultancy.com. All NamesAndSpace (N&S) e-mail services are working as expected, and you may continue to contact our technical support team via our support website at http://support.appliedconsultancy.com.

Update 14:45
Our office broadband issues have now been resolved and all messaging to and from appliedconsultancy.com e-mail addresses are now working. If you have sent us a message, you do not need to send it again as your original message is being held by our backup systems pending delivery.

As we receive several thousand messages per day, there will be an inevitable backlog of messages to clear. If you have a support matter, please contact our support team via our support website for a quicker response.

Phishing or exploitation messages are ten a penny now a days, but there is occassionally one that pops into the Inbox that can appear to even experienced users to be genuine.  A case in point is one that we have received today at our enquiries address.

This message, which we know have been received by other users, purports to say that an important service upgrade is required and that to complete it you need to download a file.  A sanitized version of the message is enclosed below:
From: tech-admin [mailto:tech-admin@appliedconsultancy.com]
Sent: 12 October 2009 16:12
To: enquiries@appliedconsultancy.com
Subject: Important Notification!

Attention!

On October 16, 2009 server upgrade will take place. Due to this the
system may be offline for approximately half an hour.
The changes will concern security, reliability and performance of mail
service and the system as a whole.
For compatibility of your browsers and mail clients with upgraded server
software you should run SSl certificates update procedure.
This procedure is quite simple. All you have to do is just to click the
link provided, to save the patch file and then to run it from your
computer location. That's all.

http://updates.appliedconsultancy.com.secure.first-systems.com/ssl/id=76040839057-enquiry@appliedconsultancy.com-patch11732.aspx

Thank you in advance for your attention to this matter and sorry for
possible inconveniences.

System Administrator

Disecting the message: Why this message is a con.

There are several indicators, but the most obvious one is the link.  Although it may be first purport to com from our domain appliedconsultancy.com, it actually doesn’t.  The full domain name listed is updates.appliedconsultancy.com.secure.first-systems.com.  The section in orange, first-systems.com, is the principle domain name, and the one that the link points to.   In other words, you click on this link, you will not be going where you may think you are going.

We have never heard of first-systems.com and consequently have nothing to do with them.

The next indicator is that there are no contact details supplied by the message.  Even the most frugal web host will supply and e-mail address and the web address of their support portal at the very least.

Another indicator is that the recipient e-mail address together with an ID Code (the part of the string with id=76040839057) is included in the link.  This is done so that the recipient server not only get confirmation that the e-mail address is valid, but also an identifier of the person who clicked on the link.

Lastly, the final indicator with regards to the validity of this message is that it was sent from tech-admin[at]appliedconsultancy.com.  We do not have any such address or alias in service, either now, or in the past.

Recommendations

As with all Phishing, exploitation and con messages, the trick in avoiding them is to be aware and wary of messages from unknown sources.  Irrespective of the message content, if you don’t recognise the sender, assume that the message may be malicious in nature.  These messages are just a new variation on the con-trick.

At ACS, we do send out messages relating either to our services or ongoing customer support issues.  All of these messages will conform to the following rules:

• All support and technical messages from ACS Limited (including NamesAndSpace and SecureSiteSolutions) will be sent from the address support[at]appliedconsultancy.com and will contain a ticket reference number.
• We do not generally send out messages regarding server upgrades and maintenance work.
• All announcements regarding server upgrades and maintenance work  for our NameAndSpace servers will be made via this blog and on our support websites, http://support.appliedconsultancy.com.
• All messages will contain a full signature including our contact details and all legally required information.  You will never receive a message from us that end with just System Administrator

Our support team carries out a rolling program of maintenance and housekeeping work on all of our servers.

• All updates and upgrades to our NamesAndSpace servers are managed and carried out by our Support Team.  This process does not require the direct involvement of any of our customers.
• You will never be asked to download an application or file as part of an upgrade of our servers.

As always, if you are an ACS or NamesAndSpace customer and have received this or a similar message, please contact our support team if you have any concerns or queries.

Access to our NamesAndSpace (N&S) servers was interrupted overnight due to an issue we experienced with the DataCentre in which they are located.  Our internal monitoring system immediately notified our support team to this interruption, and normal service was restored at around 9:10 this morning.

Our monitoring software has raised an alert with regards to a potential problem with one of our mailservers this morning (21/09/09).  Due to the nature of the issue, our support team will be taking the mailserver offline for a period of around 30 minutes to instigate a fix.

We aim to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.  Further updates regarding this issue will be posted on this blog.

Update 10:30

Normal mail service has been restored as of 10:15 this morning.