Covisp.net is no longer accepting new domains for email services, and we will be phasing out all email services.
No new domains
September 14th, 2010Offline
December 1st, 2011Servers were offline this morning from approximately 0400-0415 MST while some updates were made to the DNS entries.
The email system was offline intermittently Saturday from noon until about 1800 MST (6pm) while some maintenance was done. The drive holding all the system backups died, and will need to be replace. All backups are still proceeding to our off-site backup. No data was lost, although some mail during that period may have inadvertently bounced.
Web sites were not affected.
Power Outage
November 17th, 2010There was an extended power outage in the early morning hours this morning which depleted one of our backup power supplies and killed it. Once power was restored, the UPS lacked the charge to bring the server and router back online.
The servers are both up now. The failed UPS will be replaced, necessitating a few minutes when the servers will be offline.
This post will be updated.
CAPTCHA
October 11th, 2010We have implemented a new CAPTCHA[1] system for the login to the webmail. Most people will never see it, unless they mistype their passwords.
If your fail to enter your password correctly, you will be able to try again, but you will also have to pass the CAPTCHA[1] test which asks you to enter two words to prove that you are a real human at the computer and not some automated script trying to hack passwords. Unfortunately, we have a lot of bots that try to hack into our mail system via the webmail forms, so this step was necessary to help increase your email security.
However, this does not mitigate the need for you to keep a strong password on your email account. There is more information here, but general guidelines are:
- Minimum of 8 characters. Over 10 is better.
- Should contains upper and lowercase letters
- Should contain some numbers
- Should contain at least one non-letter, non-number like – _ # $, etc
If you fail to enter your password several times, you will be locked out for 10-15 minutes. You will know this because the login failure notice will tell you you are locked out and to contact your admin. There is no need to contact me, the lockout will expire automatically. Try back in 15 minutes. If you still can’t access your account, then contact me.
I recommend looking itno getting a password manager. I use 1Password, which is now available for Windows in addition to OS X. It integrates perfectly with DropBox, so yu can easily have all your passwords always avaialble and yet always secure. This will allow you to remember only one password to access all of your web-based information, rather than making the mistake that most people make of using the same password on every site.
Please, never use your email password anywhere else.
- [1] Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. ↩
Backups
October 11th, 2010A full system backup is running on both machines today, so mail and web services may be a little slow to respond until these backups are complete.
Power Outage
October 5th, 2010A power outage this morning took down the mail server for a brief period. The UPS on the mail server is being replaced this afternoon, so hopefully only an extended power outage in the future will cause a problem.
Update 1706: UPS has been replaced, all services appear to running properly.