Some of our customers may be experiencing difficulties trying to receive emails using their email clients. If Imagen is your internet provider, please ensure that your mail server settings are set to the following:
Incoming mail server: pop.lgisp.net
Outgoing mail server: mail.lgisp.net
If you are using your Imagen account for email only and have internet through another ISP please ensure that your incoming mail server is set to pop.lgisp.net. Your outgoing mail server will be the SMTP server of your ISP.
If you are using Outlook Express, you will find these settings under the Tools menu.
From the menu, click Accounts.
If you have just one email account setup, click Properties. Otherwise click on your Imagen account (so that it is highlighted) then click Properties.
Click on the Servers tab.
Ensure that your incoming mail server is pop.lgisp.net and your outgoing mail server is mail.lgisp.net. If not, please update them accordingly. Please note, if you are using an alternate ISP for your internet connection, please ensure that your outgoing mail server is your ISP's SMTP server.
We are upgrading our mail servers to reduce delays and better cope with the massive volume caused by the ongoing spam attacks. Most services should be back running by 4AM, however there may be some minor issues, particularly for people trying to access the server from a non-imagen connection. We expect all such issues to be resolved by mid-afternoon at the latest.
An update on ongoing spam situation...
In the last 12 months, spam has increased by almost 147%.
In the last 3 months, spam has increased by 73%.
Spam now accounts for over 93% of all email traffic.
Despite these sobering figures, the average amount of spam received by our customers has been steadily decreasing, apart from the occasional burst, for the last several months. Here are a few things we have done to reduce the spam:
We have dedicated entire servers to doing nothing but detecting spam and disseminating the results
We have joined with several hundred other companies around the world to form a distributed network which is used to exchange information about spam. When we detect a spam email, we let the others know about it; when they detect a spam, they let us know about it. This process involves exchanging details on over a hundred thousand pieces of spam every day.
We have adopted measures designed to take advantage of the design of spam mail servers. Because they are designed to send out as much spam as fast as they can, rather than operate "properly", they can often be defeated by tools such as greylist servers, which we have put in place. You can read more about them here: http://imagen.ca/greylisting.htm.
Any server determined to be a spam source is reported, automatically, to several "black hole" lists. These lists allow us and others to determine whether an email has come from a known spam source, and if so, to block it instantly.
Despite this, some spam will get through. While we try to increase the effectiveness of our detection and blocking, the spammers are also actively trying to get past those filters. This means that sometimes they'll succeed, and a burst of spam emails will get through until we can detect it, figure out how to filter it and subsequently block it.
Occasionally, users will discover the mail is taking an excessively long time to deliver, as well. This, too, is a sad result of spam. What happens is that a number of spam mail servers happen to aim themselves at us, at our users, and start sending massive volumes of spam at our servers, overwhelming them. Because it takes some time to scan the emails and deliver them, the mail servers are designed to queue up any emails that they cannot process immediately, so mail is rarely actually lost as a result of this, but it can cause delays.
In the most serious such attack - known as a "mail bomb" - our servers were inundated with mail for over ten hours before the attack let up. It took our servers another six hours to clean up the mess, clear out the junk, deliver the legitimate mail. In that same period, another local major ISP also got attacked, and despite having something like ten times the capacity of our servers, their servers were still overloaded and failing to work properly almost a week later.
What can you do? There are several things you can do to help yourself and your internet neighbors:
Use a proper firewall to secure your machine. Commercial offerings are available, or there are free options such as ZoneAlarm.
Use anti-virus software. Most of the spam on the internet is sent from Windows machines which have been taken over, without their owners' knowledge, to act as "zombies", under the control of someone else, to send spam and attack other computers. Again, many commercial offerings are available, as are free tools such as AVG Free Edition.
If you send emails to more than one person at a time, make sure you use the "blind carbon copy" (bcc) field to enter their addresses. For example, if you send an email to three friends and put their addresses in the "to" field, it means they can all see each other's email addresses - and so can any illicit programs running on their machines. By putting their addresses the "bcc" field instead of the "to" field, the only addresses they see are yours as the sender and their own as the recipient. If your email program insists on having an address in the "TO:" field, put your own address in there.
Never, ever, ever click the "unsubscribe" or "remove me" links in a spam email, and never, ever, ever respond to them or send an email to an address listed in them. All this does is tells the spammer he has a legitimate email address he should send more spam to later, or sell to someone else. Responding to such emails in any way is just signing up to get more and more and more spam.
Be careful whom you give your email address to. Some people do relatively low volumes of emailing; others do larger volumes but only to a few people or businesses - they aren't likely to end up getting much spam. People who use the same email address to contact dozens or hundreds of others, fill out forms, join online communities and so forth are much more likely to get a lot of spam, even if they don't actually send that much email; it isn't the volume that matters, it's how many people or machines you give your email address to that matters. Be choosy; unless it is absolutely necessary to give your real email address, you can always enter something fake.
If you get a spam in your inbox, don't just delete it; forward it, as an attachment, to spamdrop@imagen.ca. This address is automatically processed; it takes in spam emails and adds them to the list of known spam, so that others with similar word patterns, from similar senders and so forth, will be more likely to be detected and blocked - this benefits you and all the other users, too. Just remember, forward it as an attachment; almost every mail client has such an option. If you are unsure on how to do this please see here: http://www.readnotify.com/readnotify/attachment.asp
Lastly, don't despair. Our mail servers receive as many as 5,000 spam mails per minute, sometimes more, and some email addresses would receive upwards of 1,400 spam mails per day if it weren't for the filtering. Until we can globally eliminate spam completely, all we can do is fight it. We are fighting it and while it isn't a battle we can actually win by scanning and filtering, we will keep fighting the spammers at every turn.
New Spam Protection Enhancement being added to Mail Server.
Over the course of the next couple of weeks, customers will receive an email from us informing them of the introduction of a new Spam Protection Enhancement for our Mail Server as their email address is added to the system.. This change will help to dramatically reduce spam coming into our server.
This enhancement is called Greylisting, and allows senders of spam that use non-standard servers to be blocked from our server. If you would like more information about this addition please visit the Greylist Information Page for more information. If you would like to request more information or get some help, please visit the Help Page and send us an email with your email and contact information.
October 11, 2006
Delays in email delivery.
13:30 -
Some of our customers may be experiencing delays in email delivery. This is due to an attack by a spammer on our servers. This type of attack is known as "Email Bombing". We are working on narrowing down where the spam is coming from and blocking the spammer at the source.
It appears we're having two issues with spamming; one, that some legitimate emails are getting tagged as "suspected spam" and the other that some spams are getting through, despite the filtering. Details on why this is happening, and what we're doing about it, can be found here.
Difficulties sending emails to telus.net email addresses.
9:00 -
Customers are still experiencing difficulties sending emails to telus.net email addresses. We have been working with Telus and have narrowed down what might be the cause of this issue. Telus is now working on a solution to help resolve this issue. We will update this page once we have more information.
Dialup Customers: Intermittent issues while sending emails.
9:00 -
We have narrowed down the cause of this issue. We are currently working with our supplier on a solution.