We recently migrated our mail system to use our stand alone EBAGS setup. This provides highly sophisticated mail protection from viruses and spam mail while also providing an exceptional level of redundancy.

The move took place on the 20th October 2006. Since then we have seen a reduction in the amount of spam and junk mail we receive. However we also want to understand your experiences.

For this reason I encourage customers to take a few moments to complete this small survey and if necessary leave comments below. This will help us continue to improve our email systems.

We have had a substantial number of enquiries regarding the announcement concerning the AOL blacklisting.

At 15:49 on 21st October 2006 we received notification from a customer that they had sent a mailing out to their customers. However due to a scripting error they had sent this mailing to each recipient up to 100 times.

At 16:00 on 21st October 2006 we stopped all SMTP transactions from taking place on the mail servers. We then cleared the mail queue of all outgoing messages remaining for the mailing list.

At 16:10 on 21st October 2006 we resumed SMTP transactions.

You may recall earlier this month we announced our EBAGS system - http://portal.aguk.net/2006/10/email-backup-and-gateway-system/

We will soon be implementing this system on our shared hosting mail servers. As a result of implementation users should see a decrease in the amount of spam they receive.

Furthermore the way that spam messages are handled will change. We perform highly intelligent actions on mail as the sender attempts to deliver the message. These actions include slowing down the connection as well as performing an SMTP level challenge. These actions alone will massively reduce the amount of spam received without any false positives.

As per the earlier post http://portal.aguk.net/2006/10/hosted-exchange-mailbox-service/ we are working on getting Hosted Exchange mailboxes available.

Anticipated launch is December 2006. More details will be announced nearer the time.

We recently made big reductions to the prices we charge for domain registrations. As a result we have seen a large increase in the number of domain registrations performed by customers.

However it is important to clarify a number of points.

• Domains registered for you by AGUK must use AGUK nameservers. They can not be hosted elsewhere.
• Domains transferred to AGUK from another host will be updated to use AGUK nameservers on completion of transfer.
• We will not change any domains nameservers registered by us to an external hosts.
• We do not charge to transfer a domain to another registrar.

As per our earlier post we are currently working to deploy Microsoft Exchange mailboxes as an additional AGUK service. The Exchange 2003 mailboxes will be a hosted service allowing easy access to your mail and contacts wherever you go.

More details on Microsoft Exchange here.

The advantages of running a hosted exchange system are massive. You no longer have the costs of installing and maintaining your own set-up. You can access your emails, calender, contacts and tasks from any internet connected system as well as sync them with your mobile device.

Having reviewed customer feedback received and looked at our systems we have merged our mail server services in to one simple system. It has been labelled EBAGS or Email Backup and Gateway system.

EBAGS is a complete email backup and protection system. It provides virus and spam scanning of incoming mail as well as backup should your own mail server fail. Our own shared hosting email accounts are protected by EBAGS ensuring trouble free email usage. If you host your existing email accounts with us then you already have the benefits of our EBAGS.

We have installed PHPMyAdmin on the servers to allow customers the ability to manage MySQL databases via a web browser.

To access PHPMyAdmin simply append the word web before the mysql server url in yoru browser. So for example mysql1.netsvr.net is available at http://web.mysql1.netsvr.net

You can log in using the MySQL database username and password. Cookies must be enabled on your browser. It is important to note that we will maintain the PHPMyAdmin installation but we will nto provide any support on using PHPMyAdmin. Support for the program can be found in the inbuilt documentation.