During the evening of 24th December 2006 one of our spam filter servers experience a problem that prevented some mail being correctly filtered.

Due to the way the system is designed all mail was still delivered even though the spam filter stopped functioning. This may have meant a substantial increase in spam mails received until the problem was resolved late in the afternoon on the 25th December 2006.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Details of service levels over the Christmas period are as follows.

Monday 25th December 2006 - No email or phone support.
Tuesday 26th December 2006 - No email or phone support.
Wednesday 27th December 2006 - Limited email support and no phone support.
Monday 1st January 2006 - No email or phone support.
Tuesday 2nd January 2006 - Limited email support and no phone support.
Wednesday 3rd January 2006 - Limited email and no phone support.

Limited email support means we may take longer than normal to reply and may only reply to urgent support requests.

To increase email security on our network we have implemented a configuration change to the way SMTP AUTH works.

In the majority of cases this will not affect anyone. However we have had a small number of customers contact us because they have been affected by the change.

Basically we now only accept mail via SMTP AUTH when the sender email address exactly matches the SMTP AUTH email address.

To avoid any problems you must ensure that the ‘Email Address’ field in your mail client matches the email address used for your username when sending and receiving email. If these do not match then you will be unable to send any messages via AGUK.

Original Source: http://windowsxp.mvps.org/resetfwpol.htm 

When you open the Windows Firewall applet (firewall.cpl) in Windows XP Service Pack 2, it may read as For your security, some settings are controlled by Group Policy at the top of the applet. If this happens to a stand-alone system, then you may use the instructions below to reset the firewall Policy settings to defaults.

Note that there are a plethora of Viruses which disable the Windows Firewall settings through Policy / registry settings, even in Windows XP Home Edition. Therefore, it’s a good idea to run a complete Virus scan in your system.

AGUK Resellers are welcome to use the 49Resellers forum as a place to meet and talk to other hosting resellers.

Please note the following

• AGUK is not in any way affiliated with the 49resellers forum. 
• The 49resellers forum is not maintained by or hosted by AGUK.
• AGUK has no editorial control over the 49resellers forum and as such is not responsible for content on this site.
• AGUK will not provide end user support via the 49resellers forum.
• AGUK is not responsible for the content or privacy policies of external sites including the 49resellers forum.

I just came across this innovative new service that may be of interest to a number of our e-commerce customers. The service is called go and pay and is from the All Pay group of companies.

The basics are the customers orders online. Receives a printable barcode that they can then take to one of the 24,000+ Payzone outlets and pay by cash, cheque, credit or debit card.

his type of system allows you to reach the thousands of potential customers who either do not have a bank account and only deal in cash or are weary about entering card details online.

we have adjusted the local SMTP servers on each web server to retry mail delivery every 15 minutes for 48 hours where an error occurs.

Previously this interval was set at every 2 hours which could cause significant delay in mail delivery if there was a temporary issue with the main mail server.

We request that customers always attempt to use localhost as the SMTP server in any web scripts deployed. This means that the mail is delivered by the local SMTP server which will be much faster than attempting to connect to the actual mail server.

Further to our earlier annoucement Bounce Spam Blocking we have updated the way this is handled after feedback from a number of customers.

The customers who are largely affected by bounce backs are those using catch-all accounts. As these accept mail to anything on the domain wether the user account is used or not.

So we have created a sophisticated rule on the server that only accepts mail where the sender is null when the account actually exists.