HIS.com Status: HIS service updates

[status at his.com]

We've made some changes in services that you should know about:

   1. *mailboxes on mail.his.com have been increased in size* to 50
      megabytes for regular mailboxes (the default mailbox that dialup
      users or folks who get mailbox-only accounts get) or 150 megabytes
      for SuperBoxes (costs $5/month extra).  If a customer uses up
      his/her disk space, they'll get a warning message via email from
      the system letting them know.  This message will suggest that they
      go to https://mail.his.com and use webmail to delete some mail. 
      They could use https://webmail.his.com as well, but the version on
      mail.his.com has a bargraph on the left side of the page that
      shows actual disk space use, which is handy when clearing disk space.

      If a customer fills up their disk space, here's what happens:  a)
      they get the warning message, and a 7-day grace period starts.
      During the grace period, they will continue to receive email
      (unless they hit their hard limit of 60 megs for regular mailboxes
      or 175 megs for SuperBoxes) and everything will appear to be
      normal.  At the end of the grace period, if they're still over
      their allowance, they won't be able to receive new mail - incoming
      mail will be held for them for up to 3 more days in case they
      clear some space - if/when they clear enough space to get below
      their allowance, held mail will be delivered within 30 minutes.

      These are big mailboxes - most ISPs still provide 10 meg
      mailboxes.  No matter what the size, it's possible for mailboxes
      to get full, but with larger boxes, warning messages, and a long
      grace period, this should prevent most people from losing mail
      because their disk space got used up. 

   2. *Customers are no longer able to relay outgoing mail via
      smtp.his.com* - smtp.his.com's job is to handle incoming mail for
      domains that we handle email for.  In the past, we let dialup, T1
      and DSL customers use smtp.his.com as their outgoing mail server,
      but the privilege was abused by some folks who sent mass mailings,
      and smtp.his.com kept getting blacklisted as a spam source,
      causing a lot of work at our end to identify the cause and get the
      machine off the blacklists. 

      T1 and DSL customers generally have their own mail servers - these
      folks should set their mail servers to deliver mail directly,
      rather than using smtp.his.com as a 'smarthost.'  If they don't
      have a mail server, they can send mail via mail.his.com if they
      have a mailbox there by using their mail.his.com username and
      password for smtp authentication.  Dialup folks can just use
      mail.his.com as their outgoing mail server as most have done in
      the past.  We've contacted everybody who has used smtp.his.com for
      outgoing mail, so everybody affected should know about this already.

   3. *Our usenet news server, news.his.com, no longer carries
      alt.binaries.* and similar picture/multimedia (translation: porn)
      newsgroups.*  There are two reasons for this:  a) the bandwidth
      used by the binaries newsgroups is far greater than we can
      justify, given the number of people who actually use these
      newsgroups, and b) there's a matter of ethics involved - we've
      discovered that many of these groups contain child porn images,
      and we aren't comfortable operating a server that hosts that kind
      of material.

      One benefit is that retention time for the remaining 55,000+ text
      newsgroups will be longer than ever because of the server disk
      space freed up.

   4. *We've changed the format of http://faq.his.com to make it easier
      to find FAQs.  *There are 254 articles covering how things work
      (and particularly how they work here) at this point, and we're
      working hard to add more every week.


/Paul