Archive for the ‘Technical Support’ Category

The internet is changing in a big way today (May 5th 2010) – security is being added to the domain naming system (DNS).

It looks like it won’t affect most people as the ISPs will “insulate” people’s routers from seeing the changes. However, if you’re in IT, this is essential knowledge…

Read more here.

The intention is to add further security validation to the domain naming system so it’s harder for the baddies to “take over” websites such as your favourite banking site. For the next month or so, they’re effectively running a trial and they’ll be turning on the real thing in about 30 days – see the article for more information.

If you’re anything like me, and not a great tech-head you may struggle with the concept of passwords like I have!

One of my “learned colleagues” put it into language that made great sense to me recently: “You wouldn’t use the keys to your Porsche to start your Mercedes would you?!!” As if! It occurred to me though that to liken the password to my car keys was a good analogy … well at least one my small brain could understand.

I now have a small notebook in which to jot down my various passwords – probably not a great and secure idea but one that I can manage – just don’t make it too obvious that’s what it’s for! Some people use KeePass or Sxipper to remember their passwords but again only a good idea if your PC or Mac is secure or password protected. There are all sorts of things people do to remember their passwords. One that worked well for me when I had one randomly generated by and ISP was to ask my kids to come up with a word for each letter. It made a quirky sentence that was easily remembered.

One important and simple tip is not to use the same password for your internet banking sites as you do for other sites – in fact, one password per internet banking site is a great, simple idea!

One simple way to make good passwords is to run a couple of syllables from different words together and add a number or a punctuation symbol.

Here’s a password generator site that makes up the reminder for you!

I’m sure you’ve noticed there are a lot of web hosting companies out there, some making outrageous claims, and some appearing to be very cheap. What should you be looking for in a webhosting company? Why is White Dog Green Frog different?

One of the key areas, I guess, is that I (Brian) come from a background of being a (Unix) system administrator for many years. Having worked for Fortune 100 companies, and training staff doing system admin at those companies, I understand how they think and I’ve been able to bring some of that thinking to the practice and value that we bring as a company.
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About 90% of our support calls are related to email. Usually the call starts with “My email doesn’t work”! The following is a fun article which will solve a lot of these issues for you, hopefully saving some time.

Before you do anything, perhaps obviously, the very first step to troubleshooting is to ensure that your internet connection is working. Without an internet connection, you will not be able to receive email or view your website (or any website for that matter).

Check to see if you are able to go to www.google.com. Next step is to enter in your domain name here. If your internet connection is not working, contact your internet service provider (ISP) such as BigPond, iiNet, Internode etc.

AUTHENTICATION FAILURE
I know computers can be annoying and cryptic at times, but surprisingly, the error message that Outlook (or the other various email programs – Thunderbird, Mail, Entourage etc) provides, actually usually tells you exactly what the problem is.

Example: You hit send/receive but a popup appears that says “Enter Network Password:” you enter it in your password and it appears again and again and again and so out of frustration you finally hit “cancel” only to receive this error:

Your email rejected your login. Verify your user name and password in your account properties. Under Tools, click Email accounts…

Here’s a question for the class. What do you think that error message means?… CORRECT! You’ve either entered in your password incorrectly or you’re not using the entire email address as the username.

REMEDY: Enter in the correct password. If you don’t recall your password, you can always reset it in your hosting account Control Panel (cPanel). “Authentication failure” is just a fancy pants way of saying “login incorrect”.

FIREWALL BLOCK
Quickest way to determine if you have a firewall block is to go to your website. If there is a firewall block, it will read something like this:
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These days, email has become the way a lot of business is done, yet many small companies are forfeiting the advantage that having their own domain and email address (info@yourbusiness.com rather than yourcompany@bigpond.com or worse, yourcompany@hotmail.com) brings to the table.  I always know when I’m dealing with a company with an email address of yourcompany@bigpond.com that it’s a probably 1-man band or that they simply haven’t been able to harness technology effectively yet.  Perhaps they will in the future, but in the meantime I have doubts about doing business with them that have nothing to do with their expertise in their field, which may be first class!

Here are some of the advantages that having email under your own domain brings:

1.  Better Spam control

Despite having many email addresses, I get well under 10 spams a week from our many email addresses combined.  If you are suffering from Spam overload, talk to us; our experienced team has a variety of solutions and our default email system has most of them included!

We have solved spam problems for many companies through a variety of solutions, some of which are surprisingly simple.  As just one quick example, there are times when a change of email solves spam problems completely, other times simply not publishing your main email address on your website where the baddies can “harvest” it and add it to their lists is enough.

2.  Convey a professional appearance

Having your own domain conveys a sense of professionalism and seriousness about your business right off the bat.  Wouldn’t you prefer to do business with a company that is committed to itself?  Remember first impressions can be very important in business, and an email address mentioning hotmail, yahoo or bigpond conveys a definite impression of being a one person company. (Note that this doesn’t apply as much to gmail which is often used by professionals even in large companies)

While none of us want to project a false impression that our companies are much larger than they are, projecting the impression that you are smaller than you are is just as false and doesn’t serve you or your customers well.

3.  Be independent from your ISP
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With digital cameras manufacturers increasing the number of megapixels to improve the quality of images comes the problem of large images taking up lots of space on your website then taking ages to download onto your customer’s PC or Mac. If it’s a mobile phone they’re downloading on to, the waiting time is even worse!

The images should be resized with this in mind. Luckily there are many applications available to do this. I recently found that Microsoft Picture Manager part of the 2007 Office suite will resize multiple images in the blink of an eye! You simply open a photo with Picture Manager, select ‘edit pictures’ then ‘resize’ You can then select the predefined button which gives you a large or small web size. And click OK. If you have multiple images, go to the Thumbnail view (beneath shortcuts top left) and you can select all the resize all at once. It’s really that simple!

Another really useful program is GIMP (a free Photoshop alternative) which can be downloaded here and is available to install on both PC and Mac. The beauty about GIMP is that you can easilycreate and manipulate all different types of images.

Did I mention it’s free?

To resize in GIMP, open the image (File – Open – Browse), then go Image – Scale Image. You can resize a few ways but the easiest is either by percentage or by pixels.

If you know the specific dimensions, choose pixels to adjust the width and height (ex: scaling a 1300 x 1300 image to 500 X 500). Note: leave the little chain icon link together (if you click on it, it will unlink) because you want the proportions to remain consistent. If you are unsure, choose percentage and resize by reducing (ex: 100% to 50%). Click Scale.

Then click File – Save As – and rename the file with “_scale” appended to the filename (ex: image_scale.jpg) to easily identify that this image has been modified. Click Save when finished.

Spam is normally caused by Spammers getting hold of your email address and adding it to their lists.  They then include you in their regular emails, trying to sell you stuff.  There’s not much intelligence there; they add you to the list and keep you there even when you don’t ever read their emails.

And if you should ever try to unsubscribe, they take that as confirmation that there’s a live person there and double the amount they send to you!

Large amounts of money exist for the taking in the Spam area – the Spam kings make tens of thousands per month, with some of the larger ones turning over in excess of $40,000 – $100,000 per month!  However, as time goes on, most people have wised up to Spam and their response rates have dropped.  As a result, they are sending larger numbers of messages per month in an effort to retain their income – which in turn is making the spam problem worse!  Spam has become a huge problem for webhosting companies and ISPs, with over 90% of email now being spam.

One possible solution has been discussed, involving charging a fraction of a cent per email sent to make Spam unprofitable (Spammers sned millions of messages, looking for a fraction of a percentage response).  While a variety of possible solutions have been discussed, the bottom line is that there is no overarching solution now.  As the problem grows over time, it’s likely that something like this will come into vogue.  Part of the problem is that our current email protocols were designed 40 years ago, in a different world where email forgeries and spam just did not exist.

On our email servers, we run a multi-layer anti-spam approach.  Messages from known spam sources are not allowed to enter our email system at all, which stops over 50% of spam before it gets anywhere near you.  We then score incoming emails, assessing the spam-worthiness of each email using hundreds of spam characteristics in a database that is regularly updated.  Our system will delete optionally “definite” spam and can also be set to deliver or delete “probable” spam, based on these factors.  Also, all email is scanned for known viruses and blocked when a virus signature is found.

What can you do to solve the problem now?

1. Don’t list your email address on your webpage

If you list your email address, it’s only a matter of time before the spammers see it and put your email in their databases.  Once on their lists, you’re pretty much there for life so it’s easier to not get on the lists in the first place.

There are many solutions that can be used instead of putting your email address on your webpage in cleartext.  One of them is to encode the email address using one of a variety of techniques – a trick which renders it invisible to spammers, but makes it visible in normal web browsers.  Another option is to make your email address into an image, which reduces spam – though some spammers can now read these too with OCR techniques!

2. Use a contact form instead

The absolutely bullet-proof solution is to use a contact form which collects their email, phone number and a short message and emails it to you, without making your email address visible on your webpage.  Once the first message has been received, you can directly use email to correspond – it’s only the first message that is sent via the contact form.  A contact form

While a contact form is a good solution, it has to be done properly or spammers can try to trick it into giving them access to your server account or using it to send spam on your behalf.  We have a solution that has worked well over the years since we developed it and stops nearly all of these tricks dead in their tracks.
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Generally, it’s a rather handy feature to have Outlook suggest email addresses as you type but have you accidentally added an email that was spelled wrong or that you’ve emailed once and it always appears? Deleting that email address is easier than you think! So easy, it’s almost not worth mentioning how to do it, but we know that it will be of interest to a few of you which changes everything and definitely makes it worthy of a mention!

Start to type the email address in a new message, when it appears, scroll to the email address so that it is highlighted and hit the “Delete” button on your keyboard. It’s that easy!!

We are noticing more and more that people are having difficulties setting up their email accounts in popular mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Entourage, and Mail.

We have just added new online documentation complete with screenshots to assist you in set-up process (if you have Outlook 2007, we’ve created a YouTube video to help you!). If you are still having difficulty, give us a ring. As one of the services that we provide, we configure and test email accounts remotely for $30/computer. But be sure to check out the pdfs that we have created for you as it’s a free, excellent resource to refer to!

Keep your antivirus up to date – a good free one is Avast, many also like AVGDon’t click on unexpected email attachments

Use openDNS to block phishing sites

Update your internet browser to the latest version

Use Firefox to browse sites – there are many addons that can help protect your computer such as a NoScript which blocks 3rd party websites