SPAM flood gates inadvertantly opened for a few hours

We apologize for the unusual flood of SPAM you may have received this morning. It was caused by a botched cPanel update (to be clear -- botched by cPanel, nothing we did) which installed a newer version of SpamAssassin (v3.2.1) that is untested with cPanel, and apparently incompatible with either our version of cPanel, or MailScanner, or both.

cPanel: The Next Generation

The long-awaited next generation of cPanel has arrived! Availability for cPanel's version 11 began in May, depending on what build type, or what branch of the release tree the hosting company subscribes to (* an explanation of this at the end of this post).

cPanel's version 11 will introduce MANY new features and options for users, including a new interface. You can see and play with a demo version to get a feel for the new interface. The most notable change is th ability for each cPanel user to customize the layout. Try it!

Also included with v11 is support for Ruby on Rails and many other cool development tools available through the cPanel control panel. It should be noted that though v11 offers many security enhancements, they won't be used on our servers since we already have implemented better security measures using 3rd party applications.

As cPanel's site states, this is a MAJOR release with significant changes.

Due to the massive amount of changes to the cPanel and WHM code base, cPanel will be releasing this upgrade in multiple stages.

AOL email issues and spam "friendly fire"

Effective immediately we will no longer allow users to forward email to AOL email accounts. This decision is being forced upon us and many other hosting companies by AOL's policies, not by our own choice.

Over the past three years there's been a buzz in the hosting industry over the problems caused by users forwarding their email to their own AOL accounts.

What happens (as is shown in the thread from a cPanel users and hosting companies forum) is this...mind you, I did not write the following quote, it is one of many "anti-AOL comments" from the cPanel hosting forums:

Let's say your customer has their mail forwarding to AOL. So of course, it forwards everything, including spam. Now they check their AOL inbox, and they see spam. They report it as spam of course, because they are AOL users and don't know any better..(let's face it..AOL users are less intelligent) Now AOL gets the report and the way they work, they trigger your server as the spamming server.

This has been verified by AOL:

"I apologize for any inconvenience. Yes the mails that are forwarded by your mail servers to AOL users are still counted as a complaint. Even if the AOL user has requested their mail to be forwarded. Either the AOL user will have to be informed that by marking a mail as spam they are sending in reports against your company, or the spam will have to be removed before being forwarded on. "

Server maintenance being done

We're doing some server maintenance this afternoon, which may result in temporarily slow response times to web pages loading and any MySQL database calls. We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope to finished as quickly as possible.

EDIT 2:02pm: And we're done. Everything seems to be working as it should (and as it was yesterday), but as always, if you experience any problems please submit a support ticket or contact us through the live support window.