On Friday the 23rd of December we will be mass updating a number of email accounts.

Any account that has a non customised ‘bounce’ option set will automatically be updated to the ‘reject’ option. If you have a customised bounce message set, no changes will be made for the time being.

Why are we doing this?

With the bounce option set, each time a mail is sent to an invalid mailbox on an account the mail is bounced. For valid email addresses this is acceptable. If the email is sent from an invalid address, the mail server is forced to attempt resending to the invalid mailbox. This causes overly large mailqueues and slows down the receipt and sending of email on the server.

Secondly, some emails are created specifically to bounce. This allows spam emailers to use your account to send email. The email is sent to your account and bounces not to the sender, but to the spammers target recipient. The resultant effect is that your account appears to be sending the spam email. This can lead to the blacklisting of your site and the whole server.

Future mail sent to non-existent mailboxes will be rejected. This helps to keep the mail load on the server lower, and increases performance for all users.

Webmail spell checking is now available on all personal and business hosting accounts.

Simply login to webmail.YOURDOMAIN and click the compose button. Once the new mail window pops up you should see the spell check button.

Here’s a picture of some of our office Christmas decorations! Keith decided to make a dangly Christmas tree, and set some of us to work making paper chains to go around the ceiling here in the office. We all had to make those paper snowflakes from primary school, too. Phil and I tried to work out how to make a six-sided version, but that was too much to handle so we stuck to the traditionally incorrect eight-sided snowflake. There’s tinsel, too!

Merry Christmas if you celebrate it