Both outages were due to an attempt by spammers to overload our mail server. This is commonly known as a Denial Of Service attack. Our systems admin worked during both to isolate and block the traffic causing the issue, while maintaining clear reception of mail, so no mail was lost. 

We do apologize for the inconvenience.

Samuel had left some hot chocolate in his mug for the entire break and it was stinking up the whole entire office. Don’t believe me? Check this out!! This makes me never want to drink any hot chocolate ever again… but at least this time it wasn’t my fault.

• The image can obscure the text of the message. Email filters can’t “read” images, only text, so one way to get around filtering is to embed the text of a spam in an image. It’ll slip by filters almost every time.
• Tracking your email address for verification purposes.

The second is obviously more nefarious, and also less obvious. Spamming servers often run software that will generate a URL for that image with a hash, or cookie, in it – something like http://some-bogus-domain.com/gafdj493naf85h432io0dakgdsla99n1nlgfad9/image.gif. The server is then able to tie that hash to your email address in its sending database, so that when your email program opens that email – either by you clicking on the email, or by it displaying the email in a preview pane – the email program sends a request for that image. When the server gets the image request, it’s able to say “Aha, here’s a real email address! Load up the guns, and hammer it!”

However, you can defend yourself. Most email programs have a way to disable the display of non-attached images. In Apple Mail, this setting is in Preferences, on the Viewing pane. Uncheck the “Display remote images in HTML messages”. Now images that aren’t attached to your email won’t be shown, and you won’t be confirming your email to them.

The downside is that if you’re receiving HTML emails from friends or services, you might not see everything. Apple Mail handles this by giving you a “Load Images” button, which will then load any non-attached images. It’s just one more step, and it helps you keep your inbox just a little cleaner.

Estimates by security professionals say that this data center was the source of roughly 75% of the world’s spam traffic. I know that in my own inboxes, I’ve seen a drop from ~1000 spam messages a day to less than 100. I’ll see more spam than many of our clients because I have a number of intentionally unfiltered accounts; we don’t filter info@, hostmaster@, or postmaster@, just to make sure we don’t miss any support requests.

So, this is a huge victory, but before you start doing laps around the office, you should be aware that many spammers will simply find a new home in the coming days. We’ll probably see a new surge as the holidays draw nearer, but the win here is that a firm was shut down by the Internet community for violating commonly-held values.

Read more here: The Washington Post

I have tried Parallels in the past and not had any luck with that whatsoever. Despite much work on my computer and how I set up the program I couldn’t get it to run fast enough for what I needed. I really don’t need / want windows, I just need the applications that windows runs. So the guys here turned me onto an application called “Crossover“.

Crossover lets you run applications like Internet Explorer, Outlook, etc (as long as you have install disks and are able to use them legally). (Dogbark accepts no resonsibility for you using pirated windows stuff. Void where prohibited). So I have been using it for the whole day today and have had great results with it. I can use Outlook like normal, I have Internet Explorer 5,6, and 7 which is great for any developer, and I am sure I’ll add things as I go. So for now the verdict is that I am enjoying having all of those applications running on my mac!!

IEXP 6 for Mac

My favorite part of the program is that it simulates a windows reboot inside of crossover so that nothing actually changes on my MAC when I install software for Windows, but it simulates the rebooting process!! Too cool, so if you are an Apple fan that needs access to Windows programs, this might be an answer to your prayers!!

Have fun, good luck, and create something cool!!

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Well, researchers at UC-Berkeley and UC-San Diego have published a study saying that spammers get, on average, an estimated 1 response per 12.5 million messages. Amazing. Click here to read the article.

In short CAPTCHA forces your users to verify that they are a human being by entering letters stored inside of an image before a successful submission of a form can occur. So any spam-bots or scripts won’t be able to answer the questions and those form inputs don’t find their way into your email application or your database.

Please check out CAPTCHA Verification Page to find out more information about what this technology can do for you!