Configuring SpamAssassin in Plesk
A few week’s ago in the Tech Bench, our Director of Network Compliance, Mike Witty, discussed some of the finer points of preventing your important emails from ending up in your clients’ spam folders. Next, we looked at how to configure SpamAssassin in cPanel.
This week, it’s time to turn our attention to configuring SpamAssassin in Plesk.
ServInt VPS accounts using the Plesk control panel come with SpamAssassin as part of the standard installation. The default configuration has SpamAssassin enabled.
If you need to reenable SpamAssassin:
- In Plesk, click Tools and Settings on the left-hand navigation bar.
- In the Mail group, click “Spam Filter Settings.”
- Select the check box for “Switch on server-wide SpamAssassin spam filtering.” Read more
ServInt is Fighting For Your Constitutional Rights
This week, ServInt was one of a dozen hosts to send a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee to support updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, along with the i2Coalition which coordinated the hosting industry’s participation.
The government needs a warrant based on probable cause to search our mail or the documents in our homes. It’s one of our most fundamental rights, guaranteed in the 4th Amendment of the Bill of Rights. But because of this outdated law — the ECPA — which passed in 1986 before the commercial Internet even existed, law enforcement only need a subpoena (issued without a judge’s approval) to read emails that have been opened or are more than 180 days old. Under the ECPA, communications stored on a server over 180 days are said to be abandoned. This rationale has allowed the government to demand access to older electronic communications without a warrant issued by a judge.
That’s right… the government says it doesn’t need a warrant to search through your old email.
This year, Congress is finally considering updating ECPA. ServInt plans to directly engage in this much overdue process, offering its perspective and expertise in dealing with 18 years of serving customers online and dealing responsibly with law enforcement information requests.
We know that aiding law enforcement in responsible ways doesn’t need to come at the expense of our fundamental Constitutional rights. ServInt will be carrying that message, along with other i2Coalition members, up to Capitol Hill this year.
Stay tuned to the ServInt Source where we’ll keep you updated on the status of this and other important Internet legislation.
Image by g4114is.Configuring SpamAssassin in cPanel
Last time in the Tech Bench, our Director of Network Compliance, Mike Witty, discussed some of the finer points of preventing your important emails from ending up in your clients’ spam folders. For this edition, we thought we’d give you a quick how-to on using and configuring SpamAssassin — the spam software of choice — to actually grade your outgoing emails for you.
ServInt VPS accounts using the cPanel/WHM control panel come with SpamAssassin as part of the standard installation. The default configuration has SpamAssassin enabled.
If you need to reenable SpamAssassin:
- In WHM, under Server Configuration on the top of the left-hand navigation bar, click on Tweak Settings.
- Click the Mail tab.
- Select On for “Enable SpamAssassin spam filter.”
Note: ServInt recommends leaving “Enable BoxTrapper spam trap” set to Off.
To force all the users on your VPS to use SpamAssassin:
- Scroll down the left left hand navigation bar in WHM to Service Configuration and click on Exim Configuration Manager.
- Select the SpamAssassin tab.
- Set “Spam Assassin: Forced Global ON” to On.
This will filter all of your email for spam. It will not, however, force your users to do anything with it after it’s filtered. It will simply mark spam as spam, nothing more.
To prevent spam from being sent from your server: Read more
Amazon Elastic Beanstalk Versus Jelastic
Editor’s note: A version of this post originally appeared on the Jelastic blog.
Jelastic is growing rapidly, and we are constantly asked how we differ from other Platform-as-a-Service cloud applications on the market. Today we’ll compare Jelastic to AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
What is AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
Amazon Web Service’s Elastic Beanstalk enables you to deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud. You simply upload your application and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.
What is Jelastic?
Jelastic offers a Java and PHP cloud hosting platform. Jelastic automatically scales Java and PHP applications and allocates server resources, thus delivering true next-generation Java and PHP cloud computing.
To identify the main differences, we examined Jelastic and Elastic Beanstalk solutions based on the top concerns we hear from our customers: auto-scaling, supported software stacks, plugins, replication, building projects in the cloud, GUI, and pricing.
AWS Restrictions:
- It’s a significant amount of work to deploy your app to the Amazon cloud for the first time. The spacial toolkit requires manual installation and code changes.
- In order to use a database, you need to use Amazon’s RDS service (which provides a MySQL, Oracle or SQL server database), which comes with various additional charges.
- Amazon started with Beanstalk and never really finished it. They are attempting to redo the whole thing from scratch with OpsWorks, with no guarantees.
How Jelastic is Different:
- Jelastic automatically installs, configures and interconnects your server instances with your selected software stacks.
- You don’t need to code to our APIs – just upload your application and select your stack. You can also mix and match software stacks at will.
- Jelastic is also blazingly fast. CPU and RAM changes take place in just a few seconds, so when the load goes up, your environment gets the resources it needs automatically and instantly.
- Jelastic provides a rich tool set to analyze and monitor your application. Read more
The Two Kinds of Safe Harbor
At ServInt we are dedicated to the privacy of our customers and to the creation of sensible legislation that supports our customers but still empowers law enforcement in ways that make sense in the 21st century. It’s one of the reasons we work so hard with i2Coalition to make sure that we influence public policy in a way that’s pro-Internet innovation. It’s one of the reasons we are focused on the reform of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA).
When we talk to our customers about their privacy, or when they reference our privacy policy, we tend to mention the phrase Safe Harbor. Only there are two important things in web hosting called Safe Harbor, so there sometimes ends up being some confusion about what is being discussed. We thought we’d clarify it for you. Read more
Keeping Legitimate Email From Ending up in Your Clients’ Spam Folders
Editor’s note: A few months ago in the Tech Bench, we featured a support ticket between a customer of ours and our Director Network Compliance, Mike Witty. He had some great advice about controlling spam and blacklisted IPs.
A comment on that post about Mike’s preference for the spam software, SpamAssassin, prompted a reply from Mike that delves further into some of the nuances of spam software and how to prevent your legitimate correspondence from ending up in your clients’ spam folders.
Reader’s comment:
“[SpamAssassin] is smart and does a good job. But it still erroneously categorizes some kinds of email as spam when it is not. Deleting valid email that has been mis-categorized as spam is NOT acceptable except in special circumstances. For example, my web-based order form sends an automatic email to the customer giving them a code to enter on the form. This establishes the validity of an email address they have entered and proves it can reach the customer. But this automatic email looks like spam to SpamAssassin. So some of my customers don’t get the email and give up.”
Mike’s response: Read more
So you want to talk to ServInt’s COO?
ServInt’s COO, Christian Dawson
It’s not often that we pull back the marketing curtain here at ServInt and expose the inner workings of why and how we choose to engage with our customers, but today is a special day.
If you follow us at all, you know that we strive to put out blog posts, knowledgebase articles and white papers (like this one) that educate, inform, and answer important and popular questions, and we use Facebook, Twitter, and occasionally paid advertising to get that content in front of our audience.
We also, of course, keep an open ear to our social media outlets and engage with customers who want to talk with us there.
We enjoy talking with you through social media channels, and we think it’s important. So does our Chief Operating Officer, Christian Dawson. That’s why — starting today — he’s asked us to let more key ServInt employees drive the conversation on Twitter, with Christian taking over as the primary voice of ServInt’s Twitter feed. Our goal is that as time goes on, you’ll get more perspective on who ServInt is as a company. Additionally, if you want to talk to the guy responsible for all of our day-to-day operations — the guy who manages the managers — all you have to is reach out to us at @servint. Christian will be the guy reading what you have to say, and, unless he’s not available, he’ll be the guy responding too. And if he’s not the right person for the job, he’ll be pulling in the people that are. We expect some interesting discussions to follow!
The marketing and engineering teams will still be on ServInt’s Twitter feed posting updates on the content we publish and watching out for technical questions we can help answer. But know that if you have a question for our leadership, or if you just want a friendly chat, Christian is on the case!
PHP Session Clustering in the Cloud
Editor’s note: A version of this post originally appeared on the Jelastic blog.
It’s often necessary to extend a PHP application across multiple servers. This is particularly crucial when your business depends on the availability of the application. Extending the app across multiple servers provides redundancy, ensuring that when one server fails, it doesn’t bring down the entire app.
If your application is running on different servers, you need to be able to handle session failover. But it’s also important to have a solution that can scale horizontally. You need to be able to add more servers as necessary to avoid overloading the machines.
Ensuring high availability for your app requires the related strengths of redundancy and scalability. And there is only one way to make sure this happens: a solution that adds clustering to cloud. Read more
Have You Run Your Backups Today?
In case you didn’t get the memo, March 31st was World Backup Day.
You can never have too many backups.
Whether you host your sites on a server in your own IT closet or with a company like ServInt — that offers backup solutions for all its managed servers — you should always keep your own backup of your data off server and offsite. Just in case.
So, in honor of World Backup Day, why not take a few minutes and back up your server?
Need some help? Here are a few resources ServInt customers might find useful:
The basics of data protection
FTP / FTPS and file management in Jelastic cloud PaaS
Scheduling MySQL Backups in ServInt’s Jelastic cloud PaaS
How to back up and restoring MySQL databases
How to download a backup of your home directory in cPanel
How to download a full backup in cPanel
FTP / FTPS and File Management in Java and PHP Cloud Hosting
Editor’s note: A version of this post originally appeared on the Jelastic blog.
You asked us for it, and we’ve delivered: ServInt’s auto-scaling cloud service, Jelastic, now supports FTP.
You can now get easier access to your application files and have a fast, reliable way of file sharing and data transfer to and from your servers in Jelastic environments.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another over a TCP-based network. For secure transmission, use FTP secured with SSL (FTPS). ServInt’s Jelastic cloud supports both FTP and FTPS.
FTP in Jelastic allows you easily to upload and download necessary resources to corresponding folders. You can also work with a group of files instead of uploading/downloading each file separately through the dashboard. And it is not necessary to redeploy your application after applying your edits.
As you may know, Jelastic supports log rotation, which is designed for the easy administration of systems that generate large numbers of log files. This allows automatic rotation, compression, and removal of log files. The problem is, you can only read the latest logs through the Jelastic dashboard, not ones that have already been compressed. Now, with Jelastic FTP support, it’s easy to look through your old logs using any FTP-client.
It’s also very simple through FTP to enable synchronization between your local machine and your cloud environments as well as edit most config files — even those unavailable through the dashboard.
Let’s examine how you can get all these benefits using the instructions below: Read more
