Due to fast payment speed and simplicity in use, the PayPal system gained a vast popularity all over the world. PayPal allows any consumer with an email address to conveniently, quickly and cost-effectively make payments online while shopping for products or services. At that PayPal is known to be more secure than other methods of money payments since it allows a consumer to purchase things without revealing one’s credit card details keeping some degree of anonymity.

Integration of PayPal on the WebHosting Garage website provides more choices of payments for company’s customers. For those who prefer PayPal to credit card payments, the process of purchasing WebHosting Garage services will be easier and more comfortable via their secure PayPal account.

About WebHosting Garage Company:

Founded in 2008, WebHosting Garage is a professional provider of linux web hosting services. The main areas of company’s expertise are Web hosting, IT consulting, outsourcing and tech support. Visit www.webhosting-garage.com to learn more about WebHosting Garage services and products.

About PayPal Company:

Founded in 1988, PayPal is a global e-commerce business allowing fast payments and secure money transfers to be made online. The system serves as an electronic alternative to conventional paper methods such as money orders and checks. Having gained popularity in 2002, PayPal is currently one of the most popular online payment systems for millions of consumers worldwide providing them with a fast, convenient and secure online payment option.

Contact:

WebHosting Garage Company
Email: mail@webhosting-garage.com
http://webhosting-garage.com

Any company joining the Microsoft Partner Network benefits from a number of advantages since the community provides its partners with:

• Opportunities to widen and strengthen capabilities
• Vast expertise to help better serve their customers
• Communities to drive innovation and improve collaboration

Becoming a member of the Microsoft Partner Network is intended to help the WebHosting Garage company achieve company’s business objectives and enhance cooperation with potential customers. Leveraging Microsoft Partner Network capabilities enables WebHosting Garage to further extend company’s global market reach, lower operating costs and deliver highly innovative solutions assisting both the company and its customers to realize their business potential to the full.

About WebHosting Garage Company:

Founded in 2008, WebHosting Garage is a professional provider of linux web hosting services. The main areas of company’s expertise are Web hosting, IT consulting, outsourcing and tech support. Visit www.webhosting-garage.com to learn more about WebHosting Garage services and products.

About Microsoft Company and Microsoft Partner Network:

Founded in 1975, Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software production, services and development of internet technologies for personal computers and servers. Microsoft Partner Network is a program designed by the Microsoft company for the benefit of the global business community.

Contact:

WebHosting Garage Team
Email: mail@webhosting-garage.com
http://webhosting-garage.com

Terms of WebHosting Garage affiliate program imply the following:

• Affiliates who sign up for the program are provided with a unique URL to be placed on their websites, newsletters, blogs, forums or any other legal online resources.
• The acquired URL is not to be used for registering account for their own use.
• Affiliate program members earn 80% from each successful sale.
• Affiliate program members receive commission from initial sales while repeat orders are tracked manually by an affiliate manager.
• In order to receive affiliate payout, an affiliate must have a balance of minimum 150 USD from commissions.
• Commissions are paid to affiliate program participants by PayPal or wire transfer.

WebHosting Garage Affiliate program allows both the company and program members to benefit from participating. Serving as an advertising tool to attract more customers for the company, for the program participants it’s a quick and easy way to generate some additional profit from their website, blog or other web resource.

About WebHosting Garage Company:

Founded in 2008, WebHosting Garage is a professional provider of linux web hosting services. The main areas of company’s expertise are Web hosting, IT consulting, outsourcing and tech support. Visit www.webhosting-garage.com to learn more about WebHosting Garage services and products. Additional information about the company’s affiliate program can be received by contacting a WebHosting Garage affiliate program manager at affiliate@webhosting-garage.com

Contact:

WebHosting Garage Team
Email: affiliate@webhosting-garage.com
http://webhosting-garage.com

Organization issuing certificates is called Certificate Authority. It checks the following credentials depending on ordered verification level:

1. Domain name
2. Domain name and business details
3. Domain name, business details and personality of organization representative. It is called extended validation.

The higher security level of certificate – the higher website trust level.

Usually certificates are issued for the particular domain name (e.g. example.com).There is a strict match. Sub-domains (e.g. shop.example.com) require separate certificates with the corresponding names.

If required you can use special certificates for several domain names (e.g. wildcard SSL certificate) or multi-domain certificate.

The first variant protects a few subdomains of one particular domain:

example.com

shop.example.com

www.example.com

blog.example.com

The second variant is appropriate for protection of a bulk of domains with different names.

Example

example.com

example2.net

example3.org

In this case each domain name should be added into one multi-domain SSL certificate.

There are also 2 special kinds of certificates: shared and self-signed. Both don’t guarantee authenticity of a website.

You can create self-signed certificate by yourself. Web-resource protected by self-signed certificate won’t pass authenticity test as it wasn’t issued by trusted Certificate Authority. Such certificate is usually used in testing and development.

Shared SSL use special URLs (like https://hosting_server_name/Protected_resource_name/ ) which can be used for data encryption in transfer process. Shared SSL certificates are issued for web hosting providers or resellers therefore it is not possible to check authenticity of resources protected by such certificates.

This article goes over some of the common reasons why e-mail that is sent from your server would be marked as SPAM by Internet Service Providers, and ways to prevent it.

As the anti-SPAM methods and technologies become more and more complicated, so must the measures being taken to avoid having email sent from your server also marked as SPAM. Popular email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail, as well as most major Internet Service Providers, have specific requirements for mail servers that attempting to send mail to them.

There are several reasons for mail sent from your server being marked as SPAM, which include:

• Reverse DNS and mail server hostname entries do not match. If you changed your hostname, this could be the case. Having a Reverse DNS entry which corresponds to the primary IP address of your server can greatly help in reducing the chance of your messages being marked as SPAM. You should contact the owner of your network block (in a most typical case, this will be a datacenter support department) to correct the reverse DNS entry.
• Your mail server may be on the SPAM blocking list (DNSBL). DNSBLs are most often used to publish the addresses of computers or networks linked to spamming; most mail server software can be configured to reject or flag messages which have been sent from a site listed on one or more such lists. You can check the main IP address of your server against the most widely used blacklists by the following addresses: http://checker.msrbl.com/ or http://rbls.org/ . There will be links to all of the Blacklists, and if for some reason your server has been added, there are usually explanations on their sites of how to remove yourself.

• Your mail server may not be configured properly. Make sure it is using your full and correct hostname as the server name it presents itself as.

• You are not sending from a valid address. Make sure that the e-mail address that the e-mail is being sent from is a valid address.

• Your mail server is sending misdirected bounces. When a mail server accepts a message and later decides that it can’t deliver the message, it is required to send back a bounce email to the sender of the original message. These bounce emails are often misdirected. You should configure your mail server to either reject messages during delivery or accept them permanently.

A few essential technologies can be put into place in order to decrease the chances of mail originating from your server marked as SPAM.

Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an e-mail validation system designed to prevent e-mail SPAM by addressing a common vulnerability, source address spoofing. SPF allows domain administrators to specify which hosts are allowed to send e-mail from a given domain by creating a specific DNS SPF record in a DNS zone of that particular domain. Mail exchangers then use the DNS to check that mail from a given domain is being sent by a host sanctioned by the domain’s administrators.

For more information and instructions on setting up an SPF record for your domain, please visit the following article: <здесь нужно добавить ссылку на статью про SPF для WHG>

DomainKeys

DomainKeys is an e-mail authentication system designed to verify the DNS domain of an e-mail sender and the message integrity, and is extremely useful when sending to free email providers such as Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail. DomainKeys is able to insert a very specific string of characters into the email headers of each message send, verifying that it did indeed originate from the sending domain, and is not a ‘spoofed’ message. The DomainKeys specification has adopted aspects of Identified Internet Mail to create an enhanced protocol called DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).

The basic steps for setting up DKIM or DomainKeys for outbound mail are:

Step No. 1: Identify and install the signing module on each mail server that will be signing outbound mail for your domain(s).

Step No. 2: Generate one or more public/private key pair(s) to enable the signing.

Step No. 3: Construct and publish each public key record(s) in the relevant Domain Name Service (DNS) entry.

Step No. 4: Install the appropriate private key on each signing mail server.

Step No. 5: Test your deployment.

SPAM report feedback loops (FBL).

A feedback loop (FBL), sometimes called a complaint feedback loop, is an inter-organizational form of feedback by which an internet service provider (ISP) forwards the complaints originating from their users to the sender’s organizations. By monitoring SPAM reports from places such as SpamCop, AOL’s feedback loop, and Network Abuse Clearinghouse, the domain’s abuse@ mailbox, you can often learn of problems before they seriously damage your reputation and have your mail server blacklisted.

Feedback Loop links for some well-known email providers are listed below:

• Yahoo! http://feedbackloop.yahoo.net/index.php (requires DomainKeys or DKIM)

• USA.NET http://fbl.usa.net/

• AOL http://www.postmaster.aol.com/fbl/index.html

• Hotmail https://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=edfsjmrpp&page=support_home_options_form_byemail&ct=eformts&scrx=1

• United Online http://www.unitedonline.net/postmaster/whitelisted.html

• Comcast http://feedback.comcast.net/

• RoadRunner http://feedback.postmaster.rr.com/

With applying the above technologies, the chances of outgoing mail originating from your server being marked as SPAM by other mail servers are reduced drastically.

If you need assistance with implementing any of the above measures, please don’t hesitate to contact our company representatives, and they will be happy to help.

]]> http://webhosting-garage.com/blog/faq/mail-from-my-server-is-marked-as-spam-%e2%80%93-why/feed/ 0 http://webhosting-garage.com/blog/faq/spf-why-do-i-need-it-how-to-create/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=spf-why-do-i-need-it-how-to-create http://webhosting-garage.com/blog/faq/spf-why-do-i-need-it-how-to-create/#comments Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:12:04 +0000 http://webhosting-garage.com/blog/?p=88 Most of abusing SPAM mails nowadays have forgot sender addresses. This may cause further complications (in both reputation loss and flood of bounced messages from fake messages delivered to your mailbox) if your own email address is used as spam origin. Offender doesn’t need to have access to your mail service in order to send his own messages with fake envelope sender address. Unfortunately SMTP protocol doesn’t have any protection mechanism to prevent mail sender forgery, so this is where SPF comes to play.

Basically SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is an standard used for determining if mail message was sent by its genuine sender. All you need in order to implement SPF for your domain is to create special TXT record in your DNS zone. You could contact your domain registrar or hosting provider, if you are using its nameservers, for managing DNS zone for your domain if you don’t have direct access to it.

Let’s check this record syntax on the following example:

example.org. TXT “v=spf1 mx a:special.example.org ~all”

v=spf1 – is a special header which denotes that this TXT record should be used as SPF record by mail services.

All following directives can have “+”, “-” or “~” prefix (or no prefix which means that “+” is used). Directive with “+” (or no prefix) specifies that mail should be accepted from this host, “-” denotes that mail should be rejected and “~” means soft fail (messages are accepted but marked as possible spam).

mx – means that incoming mail servers specified in your domain’s MX records are authorized to send mail for example.org domain.

a:special.example.org – specifies that special.example.org host is also allowed to send mail.

~all - denotes that, if mail for example.org domain is received from any other location (not from preceding MX’es or special.example.org host), it isn’t authorized and should be marked as spam.

For creating your own SPF record you could also use different SPF record generators, like the following one:

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/content/technologies/senderid/wizard/

which creates required record based on user’s answers on the provided questions.

For cPanel-managed servers you could also use its integrated SPF record creation functionality. Please proceed with the following steps in this case:

• make sure that you have x3 cPanel theme for your account (this could be checked under General server info column upon login to control panel). If you have old theme, contact your web hosting support, so they will switch it for you.
• proceed to “Email Authentication” menu.
• if it is required, specify additional hosts or IP addresses (all MX records from your DNS zone are allowed by default) authorized for sending mail for your domain.
• enable “All Entry (ALL)” checkbox if you want all mails for your domain sent from other locations than specified above to be rejected.
• click “Enable” button. You should see “Status: Enabled & Active (DNS Check Passed)” message and your exact SPF record below.

Once SPF record is added to the DNS zone of your domain and propagated, its rules will be used by recipients mail services for checking authenticity of mail messages originating from your domain, effectively protecting you from mail senders forgery.

In the Internet the standard protocol for sending emails is SMTP. This protocol also deals with delivery errors, that could occur because of different reasons. And a bounce message in SMTP means an automated message from a mail system informing the sender of another message about a delivery problem and the reasons that caused it.

Below is an example of a bounce message:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at example.com.

I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.

This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.

<somewhere@example.com>:

10.10.10.10. does not like recipient.

Remote host said: 550 MAILBOX NOT FOUND

Giving up on 10.10.10.10.

The messages “MAILBOX NOT FOUND” or “User unknown” are key and might actually be any of several different messages depending on the reason for the failure:

Mailbox Not Found, invalid mailbox, User unknown, not our customer

These are all saying pretty much the same thing. In the “someone@example.com” bounce examples above, the mail server “example.com” doesn’t have an account for anyone with the email name “someone”. A couple of other common reasons:

• You typed the email address wrong. The single most common reason this error happens is simply that you made a typographical error in the email name. Check the entire email address for an error.
• It’s an old email address that’s no longer in use. Perhaps the person you’re attempting to email has changed their email address and you’re using an old one which is no longer valid. Make sure what you’re using is up to date.

Mailbox unavailable

9 times out of 10, this is the same as “mailbox not found”. That other 10% of the time it could mean that there’s a problem with the recipients email account. It is difficult to identify the problem exactly. Check to make sure that you have the email address correct, wait a while and try again, and if it still bounces try contacting the recipient some other way.

Mailbox full, or Quote Exceeded

Sometimes this will show up as a part of a “Mailbox unavailable” message. It’s fairly clear: your recipient has too much email and their server isn’t accepting any more. This is most common with web-based email services like Hotmail or Yahoo, which have limits on how much mail you can accumulate. This can also be a sign of an abandoned account – someone’s stopped looking at and cleaning out the email. In any case, you’ll need to try and contact your recipient through some other email account, or some other way.

Host unknown, Domain Lookup Failed

This means you’re attempting to use the mail server , (the “example.com” part in the examples above) that doesn’t exist. A common reason is a typo on your part. Make sure you typed it in correctly. Another reason are ISPs that change their name.

Temporary Errors

Errors like “no adequate servers”, “Connection Timed Out”, “Resources temporarily unavailable.”, “Out of memory” all typically indicate a problem with a mail server. They are, in general, temporary, and should resolve themselves over time, so you should just make another attempt to send email later.

Unable to Relay

this becomes more and more common as ISPs try to stop spam activity. Mail is sent by relaying email from one server to the next. There could be many servers involved, but typically it’s the mail server at your ISP relaying your email to the mail server at your recipients ISP. In general, a mail server must “know” either the sender of an email, or its recipient, in order to safely transmit mail. Mail servers that do not enforce this requirement are called “open relays” and can be exploited by spammers to send out tons of spam. All of these might result in an “unable to relay” message, depending on the number or relay servers involved.

Blacklist Filters

If you see messages that indicate your email was “blocked”, or “listed in”, and references to sites that have things like “spamcop”, “dynablock”, “blackhole”, “spamhaus” and similar in their names, then your email was probably blocked because the receiving system thinks your ISP’s mail server is a source of spam. Usually such emails contain a URL in the headers, where you can check the details info, for example:

554 5.7.1 Service unavailable;

Client host [84.224.150.136] blocked using zen.spamhaus.org;

http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=84.224.150.136;

from=<ybafudoweq1086@telenor.hu> to=<sawksfo@butcherblockinc.com> proto=ESMTP helo=<telenor.hu>

After bounce message is received, you can check the actual error in the headers, and try to determine if the error:

• can be fixed from your side – that is in cases or errors in recipient mailbox name, or if you message was marked as spam
• or not – in case or delivery problems on the server

Resolution
Windows
On any NT-based windows version cmd.exe program is used as command mode interpreter. You can start it in one of the following ways:

• by opening “Start => All Programs => Accessories => Command Prompt”
• by opening “Start => Run” , entering ‘cmd’ and clicking “Ok” (there is no “Run” menu element since windows Vista but you can open “Run” dialogue by pressing Windows key+R)

Now you have windows cmd.exe opened and you can run needed commands. Note only that common keys combination like Ctrl+C for copy or Ctrl+V for paste will not work in Windows cmd. You will have to use context menu opened by clicking right mouse key on cmd window.

• click on ‘Mark’ to mark text you are going to copy
• hit Enter key to copy marked text
• click ‘Paste’ to paste copied text to command prompt

MacOS\Linux
You can access terminal/shell application used as command mode interpreter on MacOS by clicking on ‘Terminal’ element in “Applications->Utilities” menu. Almost the same steps can be used to open Terminal application on Linux, difference can be only in path to ‘Terminal’ element in Main menu, depending on Desktop environment used on your computer (KDE, Gnome, etc.) Keys combination like Ctrl+C for copy or Ctrl+V for paste will work in MacOS/Linux terminal.

You can run needed commands in terminal, but please note that commands syntax is not the same as on windows and you should read official documentation first to ensure that you are using right syntax and getting correct output:

For example, hosting support have asked you for ‘tracert -d ‘ command output. The syntax of command is correct for windows, but on linux you will have to use ‘traceroute -n ‘. Not tracert but traceroute on linux, option -d on windows means ‘Do not resolve addresses to hostnames.’ and the same for linux is option -n which means ‘/Print hop addresses numerically rather than symbolically and numerically (saves a nameserver address-to-name  lookup  for  each gateway found on the path).’

If nothing from above works for you please contact technical support in case if you still have problems with running commands in command prompt.

It is recommended to begin transfer with files upload.

Upload files via FTP to the directory public_html (you will need server IP address, login and password). If you don’t know which FTP client to choose you can try free Filezilla: http://filezilla-project.org

It is also possible to upload files using control panel. You can upload either individual files or entire website packed in zip archive.

After files upload you should backup database and restore bases at new server. There are a few steps:

• Create database dump at source server. Database dump is a text file that has .sql extension. It is useful if backup file is archived (tar.gz or .tgz  extension)
• Create empty database and database user at new server
• Use “Backup” option  in cpanel to upload and restore database dump. If size of a dump file exceeds 100 Mb there might be problems with DB restoration. Contact your hosting provider in such case.

Note:  It might happen that databases and database users would get different prefix because of different account name  in cPanel. It is recommended to check DB connection string in your applications’ configuration and change it accordingly.

After files are uploaded and DB is restored it is recommended to check performance of your web-site(s) at new server. You can use this address for preview:

http://servername/~accountname

servername – name of server with your account

accountname – name of your account

You can also use “hosts” file for web-site preview at new server. It is located in folder \windows\system32\drivers\etc. Add the following text there:

server_ip domainname www.domainname

server_ip – IP address of server with your account

domainname – your domain name

If transfer went without errors and web sites are running correctly it is time to update domain nameservers.

The most common reasons are:

1. errors in your script
2. incorrect or not supported instructions in .htaccess file

There are also other possible reasons of error 500, however they hardly ever arise.

Solution

Checking web server’s error log is the best way to find the reason for the problem. Usually customers do not have access to error log on hosting servers therefore you should contact your host support (place a ticket, call phone support, etc.) and ask them to look up error message from their side.

Case I

First lets discuss the case of incorrect instruction in .htaccess file. In this case support will find error message similar to the following one in web server error log:

[Wed Apr 28 3:01:38 2010] [alert] [client 123.123.123.123]

/home/XXXXX/vstest.com/public_html/.htaccess: Invalid command

‘DirectoriIndex’, perhaps mis-spelled or defined by a module not

included in the server configuration

As you can see webserver returned instruction name it considers wrong (or unknown as in this particular case). There is no ‘DirectoriIndex’ directive, it is a typo. Correct directory name is ‘DirectoryIndex’. So you should just correct the typo in .htaccess

Case II

If error 500 appeared on request to some script (.php, .pl, .cgi, etc.) you should check file system permissions for that script. Permissions should be set to 644 (rw-r–r–). If permissions are not correct you should change them by using chmod command in unix shell, or use FTP or FileManager in CPanel.

Case III

If permissions are correct but you are still getting error 500 on access to the script you will have to ask your host support to check web server error log. Support might find in message similar to the following one in error log:

[Wed Apr 28 3:29:07 2010] [error] [client 123.123.123.123] Premature end

of script headers: /home/XXXX/vstest.com/public_html/script.php

Firstly you should check if HTTP headers returned by your script are correct. Any script should return Content-Type string first and strictly after webpage code (html, php, etc.) For example string returning header for common HTML document:

print “Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1\n\n”;

Other Cases

If headers returned are correct and you are still getting error 500 when accessing the script you will have to make sure that script works in general. The procedure for debugging failing scripts is different depending on the programming language used.