The Road Ahead

We will be performing essential maintenance work to our mail services tonight (24 April 2015) between 22:00 and 06:00. During that time, access to our mail services may be interrupted or otherwise impaired. Due to the nature of the work, all standard mail services will be affected including Webmail.

This work only applies to our standard mail accounts. Hosted Exchange users will not be affected.

Access to our helpdesk (/support/helpdesk/) will be unaffected with this work.

Update 23:25

The maintenance and upgrade work has been successfully completed. As there were a few DNS changes - changes to domain names - there may still be some intermittent disruption for the next couple of hours.

Like many Google account holders, we received a message last Sunday (1st March) with the subject Policy Breach Notice with the text:

Publisher ID: *******************************

Dear Publisher,

We have now verified that we are no longer detecting PII being passed to Google from the account(s) under your control.

Thank you for helping to resolve this matter.

Regards,

The Google Policy Team

Eh!? Even we were confused by this. The message has absolutely no context to it whatsoever. To be blunt, it is absolute gibberish. What is PII? What Policy?

A quick Google search later (the irony) explains that PII stands for Personal Identifiable Information. The general online opinion was that this message related to Google AdSense and that it probably had been sent out by mistake.

Five days later we've finally received confirmation from Google that this message was a mistake. If you haven't already received it, the message is:

Dear Publisher

Google recently sent you an email in English from publisher-policy-no-reply@google.com, with the subject of "policy breach notice," regarding personally identifiable information.

The message was sent in error; we would like to convey our sincerest apologies for the alarm that this must have caused you and your colleagues.

You do not need to take specific action on this erroneous message however, due to the dynamic nature of publisher monetization we encourage you to periodically review our resources regarding PII.

As you know, our policies prohibit partners from sending us data that could be recognized or used by our systems as personally identifiable information. When we learn of violations, we notify the publisher and take swift action.

We know that you take user data and our program policies very seriously, and this message must have caught you off guard. For more information about the specific policies that govern passing PII to Google, and tips for continuing to keep your account compliant, please visit our help center.

Thank you,

Stephen, Amy, Geoff and Rebecca
Google Publisher Policy Team

Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043

You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdSense or DoubleClick product or account.

The good news is that there is nothing to worry about. If you have a Google AdSense account, your adverts should still be appearing.

For your own protection, you should never pass any personally identifiable information (PII) to Google through any of your ads hosted by AdSense. It would appear that some time ago some publishers (aka AdSense customers) were found to be passing this information and Google notified them of their mistakes. Google then sent the Policy Breach Notice message to those publishers they considered to have fixed the mistakes. Unfortunately, it would appear that Google sent the same message to a large proportion of publishers who have never made the mistake (us included).

Mistakes do happen. It is sometimes frighteningly easy to send messages to the wrong recipients when you are using automated systems. In all likelihood there was probably a couple lines of wonky code involved.

It is a little unfortunate that it appears to have taken Google 5 days to acknowledge and apologise. This is after all, a corporation with a market value of $400 billion. Did it really take 4-5 days to investigate?

As for the original Policy Breach Notice message, we're thinking of using it as an example of how not to communicate with your customers.

When a website falls over the cause may typically traced to either bad coding, the web server, database or just plain old human failure. LeafURL stopped working at around 19:30 yesterday for an odd and unexpected cause. The AntiVirus software suddenly and falsely considered our CalzadaMedia.Web code library to be a virus.

As its' name suggests, CalzadaMedia.Web is entirely written by us and it is used in many websites we have built. It provides common functionality and controls that are required in most ASP.Net websites. It's just one of many code libraries we have created to make life simpler. Instead of copying code from one project to the next, we just use the library.

The really strange thing here is that the exact same version of the library is in use by other websites on the same server and they weren't identified as being viruses. The AntiVirus software has had a good talking to and this problem shouldn't (crossed fingers) raise its' head again.

As we frequently use shortened Urls, some users may have experienced a few problems whilst LeafURL was offline. Our apologies to anyone that was affected.

We have recently revised and updated the anti-virus and anti-malware scanning that we perform on all incoming messages for our standard mail accounts.

As before, any message (including attachments) that is detected as containing a virus or malware will automatically and irrevocably be deleted. This entire process occurs before the offending message is delivered to the recipient's inbox.

If a virus or malware is detected, our mail servers will also send a notification message to the intended recipient. This notification includes key information like the sender's address and the message's subject. As many infected messages may also be considered to be spam, the notification message may end up in your mailbox's SPAM folder.

As we cannot guarantee that our antivirus scanners will intercept every infected message, we strongly urge all of customers to install antivirus software on their PCs. There are a substantial range of antivirus/security software providers - AVG, Avast, Eset, Mcafee to name but a few - many of whom offer a free* versions of their antivirus products.

* Software licence conditions and limitations will vary - please check with supplier.

As of the beginning of this week - 19th January 2015 - we have ceased to use our advertised telephone number of 01494 372080. If you call this number you will likely get the number you called could not be recognised message or words to that effect.

The decision to cancel this number may sound counterproductive especially as we don't plan on replacing it in the near future. This hasn't been a snap decision - it is one that we have been discussing for nearly a year.

We have been nearly inundated with unsolicited and nuisance calls. Every business gets these calls as we are exempt from the telephone preference service scheme. Often, these marketing and sales calls became a deluge to the extent we spent more time answering the telephone than working.

Virtually all of our customers - both new and existing - primarily communicate via by email or our helpdesk. If a telephone conversation is required, we are happy to supply our business mobile numbers.

Geographically, the telephone number no longer makes any sense. As a business, we are now primarily operate in Mid-Buckinghamshire into Northamptonshire. A Chesham based number is no longer an accurate representation of where we actually are.

With Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and our Helpdesk, we are still very easy to get hold of. If you wish to speak by telephone, send us a message, tweet or post including your telephone number via one of these methods and we'll call you back.