A number of customers reported that they could not get to their websites starting at about 10:20 PM Eastern. All the affected clients are in the Philadelphia area. Since nothing is wrong at the server, and the support techs could see all the sites, we suspect it is a local network issue, possibly involving Comcast.

Update: Everyone having a problem reports that they use Comcast. We are able to verify independently that the sites are up and email is being received. Other people can see your sites, and send you email, and the email will be waiting for you when the problem clears.

Update: Some people report that the trouble started as earler as 7 PM. We were not able to verify the problem with Comcast, but it was definately limited to Philly-area Comcast users. One pair of users that live near each other could see each others’ sites but not their own. We believe it has resolved now, for everyone, but if you are still having trouble, open a helpdesk ticket and we will make sure you are not having some other problem.

The Crown server just crashed and we are investigating.

Update: A very large email attachment made Exim choke. The server is now back to normal.

Over the holiday weekend, we added more spam filtering tools to the Deluxe, Crown, and Palace servers. We added RBL (Realtime Black List) filtering, after a long and successful test on the Champion server. We have selected several reliable blacklist providers, like SpamCop and Spamhaus. It will not eliminate all spam, but it should knock down he worst of it. If we filter more aggressively, we run too much of a risk of blocking legitimate email.

If you feel that some of your desired email is being filtered, we DO have ways to make sure it is received, by whitelisting domains. This will be useful if one of your associates’ websites is hosted on a server that is blacklisted (which may have nothing to do with your associate). We CAN exclude your domain(s) from this filtering if you prefer to receive unfiltered email. Please open a helpdesk ticket if you have questions, want to add to the whitelist, wish to be excluded from the filtering, or want us to add RBL filtering to your VPS account.

Think long and hard before you send a big promotional email blast. Are you doing it in a professional manner? ASK before you send, if you have any doubts at all.

This morning, a consultant we host sent out the “Official Electronic Newsletter” for their client’s brick-and-mortar store - using Mac Mail from their desktop. They used an email message with 760 bcc’s, sent over their Verizon connection, using the SMTP of an email address at their Gryphyn-hosted domain name. They spoofed their own client’s email address.

This message was spam. It violated Gryphyn Media’s Acceptable Use Policy, the federal CAN-SPAM Act, the professional standards of the marketing industry, and simple common sense. It was also a huge disservice to their client - a nice little store trying to tell customers about the holiday sale. Oh, and the message subject had a code fragment in it. D’oh!

We suspended their hosting account. They will have to find a new host. And their client will find out when all the message bounces roll in.

Don’t let this be you, in this season of holiday promotion. It costs as little as $20/mo to get a professionally-hosted email list service to handle your email blasts.

The Champion server is running higher loads this morning, making it seem sluggish. We have identified the problem script and should have it cleaned up shortly.

Update: All fixed. A process was frozen.