Saturday, February 2, 2008

Keeping current

Please remember to provide us with your current information, both contact (email) and billing (credit card number, current billing address including zip code). The address you give us needs to match the address associated with your credit card. This is an anti-fraud measure, standard among most companies that accept credit cards online, and it is for your protection.

As a victim of identity theft/credit card fraud myself, I can tell you how much of a hassle this is to straighten out, when it could have been prevented had the merchant refused the transaction because the address didn't match.

We also need to be able to contact you in case of an emergency or billing issue. Please make sure the email address you provide is one that is one that you check. We are an Internet-based company and primary method of communication is email.

There may be occasions when you will be asked to re-input your credit card number. None of your credit card information is stored on our server. This is done for your protection, and in accordance with Visa/Mastercard rules for online merchants.

The information passes through our system encrypted and should there be a glitch in the billing system, we have no way of retrieving the actual credit card number. The encrypted data is not human-readable nor even machine-readable. Again, all of this is done from your protection, and should be viewed as such. In the event you are asked to re-enter your credit card data we apologize in advance, but feel the security of your financial data is worth a little inconvenience.

And lastly, we provide numerous ways of subscribing to this announcement blog. You can subscribe by email, RSS reader or even have the posts sent to your cell phone. Please avail yourself to whichever way works for you so that you can stay informed.

Friday, February 1, 2008

Attention AOL users

To paraphrase an old Southwest airlines commercial...You are now free to move about the mail server.

The block that was placed against our server IP by AOL has been lifted, and email is now free to flow back and forth between AOL and our portion of the Internet. For further information on why this occurred in the first place, please read the original post about SPAM friendly fire.

As with the majority of web hosts who are concerned about SPAM and take email seriously, we are continuing to stand by our policy of not allowing automatic email forwarding to AOL accounts, to guard against this happening again.

I would strongly encourage all users to set up an email client on your computer, so you will have access to ALL your email and not need to use forwards or webmail. Our server supports IMAP which will leave a copy of the email on the server also, either for a set period of time or indefinitely, depending on how you set it up.