the sephone blog

For those of us that are “40 something,”  you remember what life was like before email.  I remember the first email I ever sent was to my boss (back in the 90’s).  Once I sent it, I got up from my desk, walked across the building to his office and we sat and waited for it to arrive.  Both of us looked at one another and said…”You have got to be kidding me, this is supposed to be faster than a phone call or a fax?”  Well unlike him, I knew in my heart of hearts this email thing wasn’t going to go away. He kept saying to me, “Cotiaux, this internet thing is another marketing fad.”  Now we still giggle about it when we catch up with each other a few times a year – the old fashioned way.  By PHONE, and now that has changed to, it is by CELL phone!

So email consumes us and with good connectivity it arrives instantly at its intended destination.  And then there is SPAM! SPAM you may not have known you asked for by subscribing to a newsletter and SPAM that you never asked for in the first place!

But where is this all going?  Do you want all your emails going to your blackberry (or other smart phone?)  Our clients send me large files that can be completely unusable to see on my blackberry so why do it?  AND sometimes I need thinking time for when people ask me questions and I need to talk to others in order to answer it.  These people (our team at Sephone),  don’t work 24/7 they actually have a life!

Is it really that important to be THAT available to EVERYONE you know in all facets of your life ALL the time (weekends, holidays, etc.) ? AND how do the people you are WITH physically all the time feel when you are constantly looking down, checking that flashing red light?  It is only going to get worse.

Then when you reply to those emails from your phone, are you really saying it how you really want it to be received? Or  you may not have your glasses on, you feel rushed to respond with an incomplete answer and have to go back and redo it and in the meantime you have an email out there that is misspelled and maybe not really what you meant it to say.  All in the name of our 24 hour “news” cycle! “We’ve come a long way baby,”right?

The solution is different for everybody.  But managing IT without IT managing YOU is the biggest challenge.  I struggle with it all the time.  In fact I find if I lose my blackberry or have a poor signal (we are in Maine after all),  I feel pretty stressed AND I don’t have all my email going to it!  I am really trying hard not to be run by technology.

What are your thoughts and ideas?

Would love to hear (and share) them!

We wanted to let you know about a change we’ll be making to our hosting environment over the next few months and how it will affect the sites we host. Remember, each site on the Internet is hosted – or stored – on a server computer, and whenever someone visits a site, the computer where the site is hosted sends the page to the visitor’s web browser so that they can see the page.  Most of the sites we develop here at Sephone are hosted on Sephone Managed Servers.

What’s changing and why

Since our inception in 2001, we have owned and managed our own datacenter in Maine. Most of our clients host with us, and some host elsewhere, and that’s o.k.!   Today we have two hosting environments for our sites, one here in Orono, Maine and the other at another datacenter through another service provider that we trust explicitly.   Over the next several months we’ll be moving the sites and email from our Orono datacenter to our other environment.

We’re doing this for a couple of reasons. Our #1 reason is pretty simple: we want to do everything we can to make sure your site serves as fast and as reliably as possible. By using a separate service for hosting, we partner with a devoted team of people who continue to ensure that your site is up and running all day, every day. We’re also able to use some advanced tools to make sure everything is serving correctly, and if something does happen, we can normally resolve the problem much more quickly. Finally, our tests have shown that sites serving at the new location are as responsive or serve much more quickly thanks to the additional resources available.  And if you need more space or computing power, we can more readily accommodate your sites needs.

What this means for your site…  It’s all good!

We’ll be moving sites and email from Orono to our new environment between now and July.  We’ll update our Status Dashboard at status.sephone.com with dates and times of upcoming moves as we migrate our servers between environments.

There may be a short amount of downtime on some servers as we move each one.  But, as we will be doing most of the moves during off-peak hours and will provide updates on the Status Dashboard as we work., we’ll try to limit downtime as much as possible during the process.

As always, if you have any concerns – or if you would like more information about this change – please contact us via our support center or give us a call. We’ll do everything we can to provide you with the best answer we can.

Sephone has and always will be a solutions provider.  Our solutions are software based and they all need a place to live.  Owning a datacenter is nice, but managing  the hardware isn’t nor is it necessary.   That’s why we decided to reconsider where we want our services like datAvenger.com, maine-shop.com, broadcasternow.com, resourcemls.com, hulacart.com, happenings.us.com (maineevents.com, njhappenings.com, flhappenings.com, mahappenings.com, pahappenings.com & more coming),  and niteclerk.com; that you have become to depend on to reside here too.   This move allows us to focus on our software development – and leave the hardware maintenance in the hands of those who focus on that.

Rest assured, Sephone is very involved in the operations of the environment, we are able to manage the servers and respond to conditions as needed. Your sites are your business and we are committed to providing the best environment possible.  The biggest difference is that we are not the first to respond to networking, routing, A/C, power and other hardware failures that may happen.  This is the responsibility of dedicated partner resources who are on-site 24×7x365 and are committed to US to provide the best environment possible!

Sephone has and will maintain a presence in Orono to support existing co-location clients who manage their own servers and bandwidth.  We provide remote hands services and space in these cases and no changes in these agreements are to be experienced.

Lastly- this is a growing trend.  Most design and development firms in the area (& the U.S.)  have done this already or are also going through the same steps.  With companies like RackSpace and Amazon making highly accessible and robust facilities available where it is extremely efficient in both time and costs to scale up capacity- there is no doubt this is a good move for Sephone and our clients.  Beginning our 10th year and looking forward to the next 10, Sephone is excited for what is in store for us and our clients.

On Wednesday this week, our phones started ringing off the hook. By the end of the day we had talked to dozens of customers that were effected by the Fairpoint/Verizon “cut-over.”  Simply put, this means email conversions from Verizon servers to Fairpoint servers.  Often customers have business cards and all kinds of other things printed with email addresses chose to keep their emails the same (with Verizon at that point) after the launch of their business websites.

Apparently, our customers told us that they had all ready made calls to the Fairpoint Customer Service number and got lost in a voice mail tree that eventually “the voice” told them that due to high call volumes they were unable to help them at that time.                    

Our small business customers they need their email.

Click here for the news story if you haven’t heard it reported yet.  Fairpoint has updated their website with some of the CORRECT information, but it you are a small business and you have email or contact forms you may still be having trouble.  We have identified our list and made changes, but if you have a different web developer or we may have missed your site in the process please go to this link and we will get on it right away.

The FAQ page for Fairpoint is right here. The reason I said “SOME” of the correct information, because our small businesses accounts have mail that come through their website server (where the site is hosted,) and go to their Fairpoint email account.  The information for the setting for the incoming mail server is not correct.

Your incoming mail server should read as follows:   mail.mywebsitedomainname.com.
The mywebsitedomainname.com is whatever your  .com website address is.

Fairpoint also didn’t use any screen shots on their sites for Outlook or Outlook Express.

Often I think a “picture is worth a thousand words.”

This is how your setting should look:

Outlook email users:

Here is a screen shot for Outlook Express:

Also don’t forget wherever it says “mydomain” or “domain”  that means your website address!

Please know that you can always call us and we are glad that you do – even when we are just bystanders like you, we are in this together!  Thanks  for thinking of us!

At approximately 3:55 AM this morning, one of our e-mail servers (Havok) experienced an error while updating virus definitions. This prevented addresses on that server from receiving mail sent after 3:55 AM. We were working on updating the server to fix the issue throughout the morning, and as of 2:45 PM mail delivery returned to normal on the server. Most mail sent while we were working on the server (between 3:55 AM and 2:45 PM) should be delivered shortly, and any mail sent from this point on should be received normally.

This delay did not affect all of our customers.  In fact it affected only the customers on one server and we apologize.   Many customers received email as they normally would, so if things seemed normal, they probably were!  Not sure which e-mail server your site uses?  You can often find out by using our MyServer tool.

Thank you for your patience and again we’re sorry about any inconvenience the delivery delays may have caused today. We’re taking steps to make sure that similar delays do not happen in the future. As always, if you have any questions, please e-mail us at support@sephone.com.

You may have just seen an email that was from barracuda_notice@ sephone.com recently.  If so, you are probably wondering what it is.

If you are, well let me share.

Sephone knows that SPAM is the number #1 P.I.T.A.* of all e-mail users.  SPAM stinks.

As a means to fight SPAM, Sephone acquired SPAM Firewalls from Barracuda Networks-  Customers wishing to enhance their SPAM filters from the included services with all our hosting packages are able to subscribe.  There is a small monthly fee per account.
Call or email us support @ Sephone.com for more details.

The service was initiated in early 2008 for a small test group and over the last several months we have been adding new subscribers as they inquire on how they can improve their SPAM filters.  Until now, we have been providing the services to help train the filters- BUT NOW-  all subscribers to the barracuda can have access to their own quarantine lists.

Every day you will get an notice from barracuda_notice@ sephone.com IF you have anything in quarantine.  From the email you can go directly to the account and manage your queue.

• So if you dont get that important email you have been expecting-  login to your quarantine account and see if the message is in there.
• If it is, then mark it as “Not SPAM” and let it be delivered.
• If you see mail in there that is “unknown” , take a few minutes; look at it, if it is SPAM, mark it as such, if it is marked as SPAM and you want it delivered, mark it “WhiteList” Or NotSpam and now when ever email is received- from that sender-  the Barracuda will let it thru instead of quarantining it.  This is also “Training”.

Sephone is pleased to offer this service to help rid you of SPAM.

To learn more about fighting SPAM or to subscribe to this service contact us at support@sephone. com.
To learn more about Barracuda Networks, visit http://www.barracudanetworks.com

Fees are for each email account that you wish to be protected.  Aliases are included.  Additional Domains and associated email accounts are extra.  A small set up fee may apply depending on the number of domains and accounts to be included.

*P.I.T.A = Pain in the A$$   

Last night we performed a large move of servers at our main datacenter. While we were moving, we noticed that one of our primary mail servers (Cyclops, or mail.sephone.com) required a server rebuild before it could be moved to the new location.

If you use mail.sephone.com as your address to check mail (either as the address you use to access webmail or your incoming server), you were one of the domains affected by this rebuild.

If you’re not sure which mail server your site uses, please use our new MyServer tool to check. Your domain is on Cyclops if the name next to “Your mail server:” is “Cyclops.”

One important change for Cyclops users: you must use your primary domain and primary e-mail to log into your account. If you have a primary account of robert.smith@example.com, for instance, but you also have an alias or forward (an email address that automatically forwards to a primary account) at robert@example.com, you must log in with the robert.smith@example.com address. Also, if your business uses multiple domain names (for example: example-site.com, example-company.com, and example.com) you must use the primary domain name, instead of the aliases or forwards. If you’re unsure which domain is your primary domain, give us a call.

We apologize for any inconvenience that results from this move. Please keep in mind that this server rebuild will provide faster mail connectivity in the future for your domain.

We’ve provided additional information for webmail (by going to http://mail.sephone.com or http://mail.yourdomain) and a POP (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.) users below.

Additional information for webmail users

If you normally view your mail by logging into http://mail.sephone.com or http://mail.yourdomain, you will notice a new version of webmail. Most of the features of the new webmail match those of the old webmail, but you may notice a couple of differences after you log in.

Please remember that we provide webmail as a courtesy to our users. If possible, please use a POP program like Outlook or Outlook Express to check your mail. If you need a POP program, Thunderbird is a great option that is free to download.

Please give us a call at (207) 262-5040 or send an e-mail to support@sephone.com if you’re having trouble logging in, checking your mail, or if you need to administer the users in your system.

Additional information for POP (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.) users

If you use Outlook, Thunderbird, or another program to check your mail, you may need to check your account settings to make sure that they are correct. Most importantly, make sure that your incoming mail server is mail.yourdomain (the incoming mail server for datavenger.com, for example, would be mail.datavenger.com). Also make sure you are using your primary email address as well as your primary domain name in your email address and incoming mail server.

For assistance with changing your mail settings, please consult the instructions for Outlook or Outlook Express, using the settings found in the MyServer tool.

Please give us a call at (207) 262-5040 or send an e-mail to support@sephone.com if you’re having trouble connecting, checking your mail, or if you need to administer the users in your system.