Messages

Sadly, it's not just here. It happens to almost everyone that's not a MAJOR email provider. Email issues about spam (either getting too much of it, or being blocked inadvertently) were the most common source of calls when I worked tech support the past year. The problem is simply that email was designed back when you could (and did) trust literally everyone on the internet to play nice. That, of course, is pretty much the opposite of today's internet, yet we're still using almost exactly the same protocol, just having tacked on things like block lists. Someone's going to have to invent something better pretty soon.

Some of you may have noticed that many emails have been getting bounced when you try to send from xepher.net to other services over the past few days. Turns out the datacenter where the server is got their entire range added to the Spamhaus PBL. This is a kind of blacklist, and it specifically says "these IPs are dynamic (they change ownership frequently), for home and other use, and shouldn't be sending email." I requested an unblock a couple days ago, and it went through, but as they work to resolve the issue as a whole, it looks like the server got whitewashed with the rest of them, and back onto the list. I've again gotten it removed, and hopefully it'll stick this time. If not, I'll continue to work on getting it resolved. Believe me, this is more annoying to me than anyone... I (obviously) use this for all my own mail. :-)

Hmm... I guess I phrased that poorly. It was just the webserver (aka "apache") that was restarted, not the whole machine.

I just saw "Where the wild things are"... I thought it was pretty good. I love the cinematography, and the way even the most absurd stuff (hitting owls with rocks) could be taken seriously. Anyone else have opinions?

Updated with news about second outage.

It looks like it didn't handle the "graceful" restart after the monthly log rotation. I've changed that to a hard restart of apache, which should hopefully prevent future problems.

Update: Second outage (0700 UTC Nov. 3rd) is not my fault. :-P The datacenter lost power and all servers there went offline. It's now back up as of 20 minutes ago.

My apologies for the outage today. The webserver was offline about 12 hours (exactly during the period where I was asleep.) It looks like it tried to restart as per normal due to monthly log rotations, but something prevented it from coming back up correctly. Unfortunately, I don't really know why, as it's an error I've not seen before.

It's back up now, and I'll be keeping a close eye on it. I'll try some troubleshooting later in the night to see if I can narrow down the cause. Thanks to all of you who IMed me letting me know there was a problem... If I'd been anywhere but asleep, I would've gotten to it much quicker.

Well, first off, read the bit about spam filtering at http://xepher.net/help.php The key point is that messages can be delivered to "Unsure" if it's not sure if they're spam or not... basically, that means you need to train it on these messages. You do this by moving them to either the Junk folder (meaning "learn this as spam") or to any OTHER folder (such as Inbox) where they'll be learned as not-spam. After you get it trained, very few messages should go to Unsure, but it takes a bit of time to train it properly. Moving things TO Trash is or Unsure is completely ignored for spam purposes. Moving to Junk is the only way to learn it as spam, and moving it to any other folder (inbox or your own created folders) learns it as non-spam.

That said, the delete button in webmail should send it to the trash folder. If it doesn't, let me know what it says when you mouse over that button.

I'm sorry, but I'm going to say no on this one. A single paragraph (while yes, important) isn't enough of an update to convince me you'd be able to maintain regular updates of content here. Sorry, but I wish you the best of luck elsewhere!

Sorry I took so long to finally make a call on this. I'm afraid I'm going to say "no" though. Mostly it's due to the sporadic nature of updates, and the all-inclusive nature of the content. That is, you have a lot of stuff, but it's jumping all over the place, both in quality and in purpose. One of the requirements is regular updates, and I'm just not convinced that would happen.

As for other places to try, you've mentioned most of the free services that don't suck too bad. There are a ton of places that offer really cheap (like $3/month) hosting for websites, and then you can do pretty much anything you could've here, with no ads. Best of luck!

I assume you're talking about webmail? The "stop" button (octagon) actually is the logout button. The delete button is a circle with a line through it, and it SHOULD move messages to the trash folder. It does when I try it, and if you hold the mouse over it, the tool-tip that pops up says "move message to trash".

As for the actual folders... moving something to trash, or deleting it permanently are up to you. Messages are automatically deleted after two weeks from the trash folder though. The Junk folder is for actual spam... moving something there causes the spam filter to learn that messages as junk mail, and block similar messages in the future.

Well, I'll say that "beta" isn't really the term most writers use. That's usually software. That minor issue aside, yeah... I need a place to swap stories and such for critique as well. Let's do it.

Yeah, FTP is an old protocol that isn't secured/encrypted in anyway. As such, xepher.net doesn't support it, and only accepts SCP/SFTP connections. Many modern file transfer programs handle this just fine, including FileZilla, winSCP, etc. Macs have built-in support for scp, and linux has been using it as the default for years.

The page you're seeing is the PHP info page. I've set that as a default page, and yes, it does reveal a lot of server info, but it also verifies that PHP is working, and a lot of the info there can be useful for the website developer, including program and document root paths, installed php extensions, etc. I've never believed in security-through-obscurity, and so it doesn't worry me to reveal the info there. The other thing it does is provide a default page that prevents a directory listing from being shown, and is an obvious file that new users can see as an example of where/what to replace with their own default page.

Yeah, I'd hate to think how little I'd be making if I had gone into journalism (what my degree is in) instead of computers. Of course, now that I'm trying to get out of IT, I'm back to minimum-wage level jobs it looks like. Yay.

For further information, I submit "Sex with Ducks" http://garfunkelandoates.com/music/clips/10/sex-with-ducks/

Yes, that is the ukulele girl from Scrubs.