The Road Ahead

Free SSL certificates by LetsEncrypt are now available for all hosting customers through the Hosting Control Panel. Once installed, the certificates will automatically renew every 60 days.

Installation is quick and easy to do. For a step-by-step guide, see Adding a free Let's Encrypt SSL Certificate to your website.

We're currently undertaking some upgrade work on our hosting control panel server. Unfortunately, this means the hosting control panel will be offline until this work is completed.

In the meantime, if you have any tasks that would normally be done through the control panel, please send us a message and we will do it for you.

Spam (or electronic b*ll*cks to quote one customer) is a substantial irritant to both our customers and ourselves. On average, about 50% of the messages our receive each day are categorised as being spam. A substantial proportion of these messages are intercepted and deleted before they reach individual mailboxes. Messages that don't meet the deletion criteria are automatically placed with the SPAM folder in each mailbox as the odd one or two may be legitimate.

Over time, individual spam folders can grow to contain hundreds or thousands of messages. As the size of the spam folder does count towards overall mailbox size usage, there have been a few instances where a large spam folder has consumed an entire mailbox's quota. Once this quota limit is reached, no new messages can be sent or received by the mailbox until some messages are deleted.

To counter this, as of 12th October we've instituted a new policy whereby we will automatically delete all spam messages that are older than 28 days. To avoid any valid messages being lost, we advise all customers to check the contents of their spam folder at least once a week and move any false-positives (valid messages categorized as spam) to another folder within their mailbox.

We're starting with 28 days, but we are looking at reducing this period down to 21 or even 14 days based upon customer feedback. The deletion occurs on our server, so you may not see messages being removed from spam folders until your account next synchronises with our servers.

In response the the major cyber attack that has targeted the NHS and other business across the UK last week, Microsoft has released a critical update for all operating systems including those no longer supported such as Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003. Microsoft has urged all Windows users to apply the MS17-010 hotfix update as soon as possible.

This update has been released through Windows Defender. More information about the hotfix may found on the Microsoft Technet website.

For most personal and small business customers, install this hotfix and any other outstanding updates via Windows Update. In Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016, the update should be automatically installed. If not, access Update via Start > Settings > Update

What is WannaCrypt and how does it work?

The ransomware known as WannaCrypt has taken advantage of a security vulnerability within Windows that present in at least 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries worldwide. Once a computer is infected, all of its' files are encrypted by the ransomware which then demands payment from the user to access their files. If payment is not received by a certain date, then it is potentially lost forever.

Once installed, WannaCrypt acts like a worm and replicates throughout the local network infecting any other vulnerable computers.

This vulnerability came to light in March and Microsoft issued a patch for all supported Windows systems. WannaCrypt has taken advantage of computers that are either running older, unsupported versions of Windows (Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003) or those that have not had the patch installed.

Email Scanning

Although we scan all email messages that pass through our servers, we cannot guarantee all infected files are intercepted and deleted. We urge all our customers to ensure they are protected against ransomware, viruses and other malware attacks by ensuring they have an up-to-date security software installed on all computers.

Our standard mail services are currently experiencing substantial issues. Our primary mail server suffered a substantial failure this morning and we have still not be able to revive it

Hosted Exchange services are not affected and our web hosting, domain registration and other services are working normally.

We are currently working with our server provider to restore normal service as soon as possible. Our current plan is to restore the server using last night's backup that is undertaken by our server provider.

We will post regular updates in the post and at on Twitter at https://twitter.com/calzadamedia

Update 13:40

Unfortunately, recovery using last night's backup has failed. It would appear that the cause of the issue occurred prior to the backup taking place.

We will now attempt to recover using a slightly older backup.

Update 15:30

Unfortunately, all attempts to restore have from our server provider backups have failed. We are currently rebuilding the server and hope to restore normal service as soon as possible.

Update 17:53

The replacement server has been provisioned and we are progressing through the installation and configuration tasks. If there are no major issues we aim to restored standard mail services later today.