June 27, 2006 - Scheduled Server Maintenance

Synopsis

• Date: Saturday, June 27, 2006
• Time: 11:59 PM CST
• Duration: 4 Hours

Cerberus technicians have scheduled routine maintenance to begin at 11:59 PM on Saturday, June 23, 2006 for approximately 4 hours.

Routine maintenance, upgrades, and some additional tweaking will be performed at this time. Although the maintenance is not expected to take the entire duration of the maintenance window, periods of decreased performance and/or service interruptions may occur.

Some mail changes are planning to be implemented at this time. The first change that will be implemented is that any servers that do not utilize Maildirs for mail storage will be converted to Maildir. All emails will remain intact in their appropriate folders, and the change should be relatively transparent to you, the user. This will prepare you to be able to utilize other changes we plan on making in the future to aid us combat SPAM. If you are unsure whether your server will be affected by this change, please feel free to email our support department at support@cerberusonline.com.

Also, due to the drastic increase in the amount of SPAM that is being sent over the internet, we are planning to install new programs that are used to help combat and track SPAM. We will also be updating and improving existing programs that were previously used to combat SPAM.

In addition, we plan to implement server-side rules that will hopefully block certain influxes of SPAM. One planned change will be to switch email from being sent to the default mailbox for cPanel user accounts for an address that hasn't been setup to start rejecting those emails.

For example, if you have not created a forwarder, email account, or listserv for the address 'sales@cerberusonline.com', then currently, even if someone sends an email to it, the email is redirected to the default mailbox for the account. However, when we implement our changes, the sender will get a rejection notice saying the mailbox doesn't exist.

As a warning, if you find out that people who send you legitimate emails are no longer able to send to you, please let our support department know immediately so we can track any issues. Emails that are legitimately sent and conform to the standards set via RFC rules will enter our servers just fine and will be scanned appropriately. We do not delete any messages automatically tagged as SPAM. We leave that up to you, the user.

Finally, one of the other programs we will be installing during this maintenance is a server-side virus-scan engine. All emails will be pushed through the virus-scanner to make certain to eliminate many emails that may be potentially hazardous before reaching your mailbox.

If you have any questions about the changes and maintenance, please feel free to direct them to our support department by sending an email to support@cerberusonline.com.

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Cerberus Administration