The Road Ahead

Love them or hate them - and most people hate them - CAPTCHAs are a necessity on websites nowadays. Without this Are you human? challenge, website forms like our contact us cannot detect the difference between a human visitor or an automated system.

An un-CAPTCHA'd form is a sitting target for any malicious automated system to exploit. Potential exploits range from just submitting endless junk data right through to attempting to force a security breach. CAPTCHAs don't protect against exploits, but they do significantly reduce the risk of exposure.

So this is why we use CAPTCHAs on our Contact Us, Get A Quote and other forms on the public side of our website.

Until relatively recently, we've been using an image-based CAPTCHA. This is one of the most commonly used approaches where an image is presented containing skewed and distorted text that the user has to read and then input. Technically, this works fine. From a usability perspective, it is awful. Sometimes the text was unreadable and it was next to useless on a poor screen or for the visually impaired.

So, we've replacing all the CAPTCHA with a new maths-based challenge designed and built in-house. Instead of reading warped text, you'll now need to be able to add, subtract, multiple or divide. To keep things simple, all answers are in whole numbers - there will be no need to grab a pen and pencil to perform long division. There is also no need to know you're thirteen times tables, as it only goes upto 10.

We've already deployed the Math CAPTCHA on the Contact Us and Get A Quote pages and it will be the default CAPTCHA in the next TaxiOffice update.

To improve our customer's experience, we now issue mailbox usage alerts for all standard mail accounts. If a mailbox is over 90% usage, a warning message will automatically be sent to the mailbox.

Managing mailboxes can be a bit of an art form, especially once you reach several thousand messages. Our knowledgebase contains hints, tips and guides on managing mailboxes as well as other mail-related support articles.

We're currently experiencing problems with the database that powers our primary mail server and webmail. We are actively looking into this and aim to restore normal service as soon as possible.

This problem only affects our standard mail services. Hosted Microsoft Exchange and Web Hosting along with any associated database are unaffected.

Update 16:00

The issue was traced to a corrupt database file. This has been successfully repaired and all mail services restored.

As part of last night's work, we've upgraded PHP to v5.5.11. We've also enabled Windows Cache Extensions for PHP, to further increase the performance of PHP websites.

If you are about to deploy/publish a PHP website, don't forget to enable PHP as it is normally disabled.

In light of the technical issues with mail services over the weekend, we have brought forward some scheduled maintenance work to tonight. To avoid interruptions during standard business hours, we plan to do the work between 22:00 and 23:30 tonight (Monday 11th August 2014).

Unfortunately, this maintenance will require a short period of downtime whilst some software upgrades are installed. We anticipate that mail services will be offline for around 10 to 15 minutes.

We will post further updates on our blog and Twitter feeds.

Update 00:30 12th August

All mail services have been restored. We're currently re-indexing all mail messages, so mail service performance may be degraded until this has finished.