Over the years we have made surveys asking your opinion on how to handle spam. Your responses to these surveys help determine our strategic approach against spam.

The volume of spam has increased dramatically over the past few years. We now average around 600 messages per hour, but just last week over 18,000 spam messages came into our mail servers in a single hour!

Messages from networks that

legitimate messages get blocked in the process.

We are now looking at alternative ways to prevent any legitimate mail getting lost while keeping all that extra spam out of your inboxes.

Your responses to our new Spam Survey will help us evaluate these alternatives. You will receive a link to this survey from us this month.

We look forward to your opinions!

We successfully installed our new primary Internet circuit last Saturday.

The process involved the swapping of our old T1 with the new T1 and reassigning

IP addresses and routes on the local and remote routers.

Since this sort of change happens so rarely (the last time was September

1995), we took advantage of the situation and also swapped out power supplies.

The entire process went very smoothly and we were back online in less than four minutes!

We should be able to bring our new secure server online during the second or third weekend of November.

The new secure server will support our WebMail

interface and all services requiring secure web forms, including our new Spam Survey.

This server was scheduled to be installed late last month, but

the new T1 became ready for installation and took precedence.

We've also run into problems upgrading our WebMail software to work with the new

version of our Tomcat application server.

The new secure server will be ready once we complete this upgrade.

It was a quiet month at the help desk.

Most calls were for account setup information.

If you ever need help, please select tech support (Option 2) if you call our main office. This

will enable you to get our dialup access numbers, email settings or our toll-free help desk number.

Please remember, our help desk team is available to you 24 hours a day and the direct, toll free number is
877-221-2116.

This was mainly a quiet month on the network.

Our dialup line provider had an outage on October 19 which lasted roughly from 8 am to 9:30 am.

As mentioned earlier, we

successfully installed our new T1 last weekend.

We are now upgrading our WebMail software and planning the installation of the new secure server. We are also looking into alternative mail server software.

Are you pleased with our service? Do you know someone who is unhappy with their current Internet or On-line service?

Why not do them and yourself a favor?

Just recommend our service. If they subscribe, we'll give you a free month of access!

They will appreciate your advice and you'll save a little money.

Again this month, over a dozen subscribers are getting their access in November for free - just by referring new subscribers.

Everybody wins!