ozHosting 1 AVIP .net

Mail Server Account Changes:
We are about to introduce a range of changes relating to your email services and accounts.
Please read on for important information....

As some of you are aware our services have had some trouble dealing with the massive influxes of spam that has been hitting the network in the past couple of months, along with a lot of people having problems accessing POP email due to various network and ISP related issues and configurations.
As a result of this we will be introducing some major improvements to the mail services we offer on our servers.

Removal of "catch all" or "default" email addresses
Effective from Monday December 11th, 2006 we will no longer be supporting "catch all" or "default" mail accounts on our hosting accounts. In the last couple of months our mail servers have been suffering from performance issues directly attributed to catch-all mail accounts being attacked by spammers.
The "catch all" or "default" email address is the email address that uses your hosting username as its login.

The biggest impact they have on our servers is when a domain with a catch-all mail account configured is hit by a dictionary spam attack. This style spam attack randomly tries to send email messages to thousands of unique email addresses at a particular domain. When the catch-all account is configured, this causes the mail server to accept all of this spam and valuable processing time and resources are wasted dealing with the massive flood of messages. In some cases, the attack is so severe that it causes the mail server to become completely unresponsive, as some customers on our servers have experienced.
A secondary impact of these dictionary attacks occurs after the catch-all account is deleted. Because the spammers have successfully delivered email to thousands of unique accounts, they now continue to send email to these email addresses on a daily basis. Even once the catch-all has been disabled for a domain, these repeated attempts to deliver mail to non-existent addresses can sometimes be so severe that the net effect is a denial of service attack on a mail server's SMTP service.

Instead of using a catch-all mail account, we will configure mail forwarders for individual email addresses that you actually want to accept incoming email for, and then direct those forwarders to a single POP3 account. For example, if you want to accept email for info@domain.com, sales@domain.com, and support@domain.com, but want all of that email to be directed to owner@domain.com, we will setup a POP3 account for owner@domain.com, and setup the other email addresses as forwarders.

This will make no difference to the email addresses you can use and should in itself drastically reduce the amount of Spam you receive if you currently use the Catch All account.

Please note that on Monday 11th December 2006 at 8pm AEDST (Sydney Time) the default email addresses in all accounts will be disabled on all servers and all mail sent to these accounts or to non existent email addresses will be set to :fail: and email will be bounced back at the sender. This will mean that mail will not be delivered to non existent addresses so you must make sure that all valid email addresses you use are setup either as POP accounts or are forwarded to a working POP account.
You will also need to ensure that if you have the default mail box set up in your email programme such as in Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora etc it should be removed or you may find that you are blocked access to the server by our firewall once this change comes into effect.

SMTP Server Access
As a lot of you are aware the majority of ISP's including BigPond, Optus and iiNet are now actively preventing their clients from sending email through any mail service other than their own smtp servers. For example you can no longer send email from Outlook, Outlook Express etc via our servers @yourdomain.com if you are a BigPond customer, as you are now forced to use BigPond's mail.bigpond.com smtp server to send.
This has caused a lot of confusion and concern for some users, and a lot of people assume this is our doing. Unfortunately this is completely out of our hands and is a policy being enforced by the various ISP's in a bid to stop spam on their networks.
We have always suggested to our hosting clients to set their email programs smtp settings to use your ISP's smtp setting. Please check with your ISP for the correct setting.

We would also like to take this opportunity to remind you that the policy on all our servers is that no more than 500 emails can be sent per domain per hour and there is a limit of 60 times per hour (every minute) on the number of times an email can be checked per hour. In reality a setting of every 5 or 10 minutes is quite practical if you are constantly online.

We apologise for any inconvenience these changes may cause you, but we believe in being proactive in fighting spammers and ensuring the quality of hosting on our servers is second to none. This simple change will be a big step forward in combating Spam.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding this policy change, or if you are unsure if you have a catchall default email address in use please get in touch and we will be happy to assist you in any way. Thanks for your time and support in implementing this change for the better hosting of your web site