iWeb Communities: Blog

Did you know that the Jinn and Lumiva clusters host the emails of more than 12000 domains? These 2 clusters process more than 2 millions of emails everyday, and store 40 million emails (1.2TB storage space)!

To improve performance for all customers using those 2 email clusters, we have annonced the acquisition of a Sun 7410 Unified storage unit in December 2008. After several weeks of tests and tuning, we are ready to get this unit into production.

In a few days, we will begin the online transfer with the email migration of our own domain iWeb.com.

A second step is planned in which the Jinn and Lumiva clusters will be migrated to a set of better performing servers. This migration will be done in several seamless steps, and without service interruption for our customers. You can follow the evolution of this step-by-step migration by following the system status or via Twitter (@iWebStatus).

If you have more questions or comments for this performance upgrade on our Jinn and Lumiva clusters, don’t hesitate to leave a comment and we’ll gladly give more details.

This post is about making the world a better place for anyone on the Internet. How can we make it happen? Well, one of the first step is to get rid of spam. An old but albeit interesting study shows that spam costs $20 billion in lost productivity. That was in 2003; just imagine what the figure might be in 2009!

Of course, everyone thinks about 419 Nigerian scammers, about “health-enhancement” and get-quick-rich advertisements, which can be detected relatively easily by anti-spam filters.

The other categories we don’t usually think about is spam we generate ourselves. Marketing mail, customer notifications (think about the dozens of emails Facebook can send to you every day), newsletters sent to members or customers without any prior agreement, those are also spam. So, here are 5 simple guidelines on how not to create spam mail and make the world a better place:

1. Make sure your server is secure. You can read the first part of this guide written on the iWeb blog not so long ago. Make sure especially to disable ports and unused services: in fact, the majority of generated spam come from hijacked servers, operated by unaware and unsuspecting owners. Alternatively, you can ask us to do a security check on your server (if you have managed services).
2. Make sure you don’t have contact forms on your website. Hackers love to exploit contact forms and use them to send emails, on your behalf. Of course, you can use contact forms, but only if you can make sure that the form is secure, and that the person submitting the form is a real person. The next thing you know, your server will be banned and the server will be cut off by iWeb staff
3. If you have an application which sends email, make sure DNS MX entries are setup well, especially SPF records. SPF records are necessary to let email providers like hotmail or aol to accept outgoing generated email (see this guide to help you to setup your spf entries)
4. If you use mailing-lists, newsletter, or ANY form of mass mailing, make sure they are opt-in, which means that the user submitted his or her email voluntarily, and agreed explicitly to receive those emails. Do not for instance add the user automatially to a new promotional campaign or a different newsletter you’ve designed. They haven’t asked for it, and most of them will have the reflex to “Mark it as Spam” in their email client.
5. In the same spirit, if you send a mailing-list or newsletter, make sure there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the newsletter. The link should unsubscribe directly, without them having to log in or submitting again their information. CampaignMonitor’s anti-spam page can help you to see what you are allowed to do and what you can’t

iWeb just acquired the Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System to fulfill its needs in large volume storage. To be specific, it will be used to support the email system in shared hosting, instead of the previous data servers NetApp F740 and F820.

The Sun Storage 7410 has been chosen for its very good performance, reliability, ease of use and modularity. It allows for instance: 

• Monitoring in real-time of the CPU, ram, network, filesystems, and and also specify actions with DTrace. Maintenance of the server will then be easier.
• A new hybrid architecture, which uses SSD hard drives, which have a lower access time, and lower energy needs, and which uses at the same time traditional hard drives with larger capacities.
• A good modularity, which will allow iWeb to add resources according to its needs,
• Possibility to create configuration with no single point of failures, by clustering.

Moreover, compared to other hardware vendors, Sun offers free access to its software, which means lower costs and also better flexibility to iWeb.

For iWeb customers in shared hosting, this means they will have access to a storage server with larger capacity, which will be better maintened, and also a guaranteed continuity of service.

Over the past few years, the exponential increase in the volume of spam has forced email service providers to apply increasingly aggressive filtering solutions which sometimes exclude legitimate emails. In order to reduce the chances that your emails are perceived as spam from major suppliers such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Google or AOL, please make sure your server meets the following qualifications :

1) A valid “PTR” Record (Reverse-DNS) is configured on your IP address.

A PTR Record is essentially the hostname that is shown when a reverse lookup query is done on an IP address. This type of query is always done by default and the result is shown in email headers. Having a configured or customized PTR record will help giving your server more credibility when sending emails.

An optimal PTR record would be the server’s principal hosted domain.

You can have your Reverse DNS configured or changed by opening an assistance request with our system administration team.

2) The email addresses: abuse@.tld, postmaster@.tld should be working.

Feedback loop is an email address used to report spam abuses for a certain IP address. This address is abuse@ and/or postmaster@. AOL asks that these account exists and that they accepts emails.

3) A “TXT” DNS entry that contains a valid SPF record is configured for the domains hosted on your server.

By default, anyone can send emails from any domains by spoofing email addresses. A SPF record will restrict the IP addresses or hostnames allowed to send e-mails from the domains it will be configured on.

You can generate a SPF record by using the OpenSPF Wizard.

By having the two conditions above met, the verifications made by the email service providers are likely to determine that your IP address can be trusted and will refer to other criterias to verify wether a specific email is considered unsolicited.

If you wish to know more about how email delivery works and ways to raise your delivery rate, you can review the following website: http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/solutions/dns.html

Do not hesitate to contact our team if you have any questions or require assistance.

Using the “catch all” option in the control panel of your POP email accounts implies that all of the emails directed to any addresses within your domain are forwarded to you, whether these addresses exists or not.
You may not be aware that enabling this option affects the server’s performance and increases the quantity of spam you are likely to receive. This function should be enabled only in rare exceptions, and we strongly recommend that you disable it.

You can disable the “catch all” feature from your control panel by clicking on “Set catchall email deleted” in the “POP accounts management” section. You can access the control panel on Lumiva or Jinn to proceed with these modifications.

Once disabled, it is neccessary to create a single email account (POP) for each one of the addresses you are using. The procedure is simple.

As explained in our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section, a POP account is what allows you access to a mail server. Essentially a mailbox. It allows you to store received messages sent to your email adress. To retreive these messages, you will need a software like OutLook, OutLook Express, Netscape Mail, or Eudora Mail. Upon connection to the mail server, you will be asked for a username and a password. Once you have supplied this information, you will receive the messages contained in your mailbox (Inbox).

To create new accounts, go to the control panel then follow these steps :

1. Click on “Create POP account”
2. In the “POP Account” textbox, enter the prefix of the desired e-mail adress.
3. In the “Password” textbox, type in the desired password for this e-mail account
4. In the “Confirm Password” textbox, confirm the desired password.
5. In the “Name” textbox, enter a descriptive name for your identification purposes. (strictly informational)
6. Click the “Add” button.

If you need any help, do not hesitate to submit a request on the Customer Hub, or to contact us at +1 (514) 286-4242.