Announcement

Webmail (both SquirrelMail and Roundcube Mail have been broken for the past few weeks. Both applications have been fixed and are working.

Rhombic Networks’ e-mail servers now check for valid SPF (more information at the OpenSPF website and Sender Policy Framework Wikipedia entry) records before incoming e-mail messages are received. This may reduce the number of messages that end up in your spam folder, making it easy to check your spam folder for false positives. This is a continuation of the many other ways Rhombic Networks’ reduces e-mail spam.

We have been doing this for several years, but implemented differently. Previously, messages that fail the SPF check may have been marked as spam and placed into your “Spam” folder. Now, if a message fails the SPF check, it will be rejected from Rhombic Networks’ servers, and you will not see it.

If you think you’re losing any mail, please contact support with specific details about from whom we may be rejecting mail destined for you.

The server “apophis” has been renamed to “augustus”.

In an effort to curb the amount of spam our clients need to deal with, we are now no longer delivering those messages designated as “high-scoring” to their mailbox.

High-scoring spam e-mail are those messages that have been marked by one of our spam filterers, SpamAssassin, as having a score greater than 10. It is very unlikely that messages with a score this high are legitimate e-mail. Spam messages with a score less than 10 will be continue to be delivered to your mailbox into the “Spam” folder, where you can check whether the message was correctly marked as spam.

While these messages are no longer being delivered to our clients’ e-mail accounts, they are not being deleted. If you think a message you did not receive was accidentally marked as a high-scoring spam message (again, this is very unlikely), contact us and we can check for you.

When we upgraded to PHP 5, we lost the ability to run PHP bytecode caches, such as eAccelerator and Turck-MMCache. Today we put into beta test Alternative PHP Cache (APC), which is open-source, actively developed (by some of PHP’s top developers), and compatible with PHP 5.

This should speed up web applications considerably, including Gallery, Drupal, and Wordpress.

So far we are noticing no problems. If you encounter a problem with your PHP-powered site please contact us.

UPDATE (Jun 13): We have noticed some problems after the web server has been running for a long time. Instead of a rendered page, the web server sends nothing (user sees a blank screen, or the error “Document contains no data”). It seems to particularly effect Wordpress-powered weblogs. If you encounter this error please let us know as soon as you find out.