Red Shift Internet Services

Red Shift Newsletter for November 2006

Red Shift Newsletter

1. TMDA - a new & highly affective way of fighting SPAM
2. Salinas Store New Hours - come and visit us
3. New T1 Option, the 2/3 T1
4. New Customer DSL offers have been updated
5. Switching phone companies affects DSL!
6. Domain phishing - be aware of unscrupulous mailings

1. TMDA - a new & highly affective way of fighting SPAM

We have installed a new method for fighting spam that is highly effective at reducing spam, while insuring that no legitimate email gets rejected! This new service is called TMDA (Tagged Message Delivery Agent). This is FREE to all redshift.com customers. This service will also be available to our domain hosting customers in the near future.

TMDA works by providing a separate front-end emailbox that accepts all of the email coming to your email inbox. TMDA will send out a confirmation email to each sender the first time it gets email from a particular sender. The sender then should reply to the confirmation, once this is received by TMDA the original email is sent on to your normal email inbox and the sender will not have to confirm any subsequent emails. You can also release email from TMDA yourself if the person sending it did not reply to the confirmation - this provides a backup to insure all legitimate email is delivered. Spammers never respond to email; they will not respond to the confirmation sent back to them therefore their email will never be whitelisted and allowed past TMDA.

Within TMDA you can also manually blacklist and whitelist certain email addresses or entire domains. You can also view what is being held in the "pending" folder and make individual decisions about email that TMDA is holding. That way you can check for email you suspect may have been captured and not released to you that you do want to receive. You may delete the held email yourself on a regular basis or allow TMDA to delete it. Pending email is held for 21 days before being deleted automatically.

To use TMDA go to the URL http://webmail.redshift.com/cgi-bin/tmda.cgi

or visit webmail.redshift.com.

This version of TMDA is only available to customers with a @redshift.com email address. We are working on a version for clients with their own domain names and we will announce this when it is ready.

The first time you go to this site you must setup TMDA; which simply entails logging in with the username and password that you want to setup, then checking an agreement box, TMDA does the rest. During the first week you will want to check TMDA often in order to release legitimate email and delete spam and just generally get used to using the interface (which is very easy). After the first week you will likely find it necessary to check it only every once in a while. After about four weeks you can safely leave TMDA running in the background and only check it if there is something specific you need to search for.

For those who would like Red Shift to setup TMDA for them, there will be a fee of $4.95 per emailbox setup.

For more information on TMDA, we have setup the following web link:

http://www.redshift.com/faqs/tmda.php

2. Salinas Store New Hours - come and visit us

Our Salinas store has been open for 7 months now. We've changed our hours from 8am-7pm mon-fri to 8am-6pm mon-fri and 10am-2pm on Saturdays. On or about the first week in January we will expand our Saturday hours to 10am-6pm. We encourage our clients to come visit us there, especially for any personal computer repair or Internet access questions or needs. We're at 1124 South Main St., which is next to Winchells Donuts and Longs Drugs in South Salinas. In the next six months we will be expanding our service lab to be able to handle more computers. We are also working on a wireless hotpot at that location.

3. New T1 Option, the 2/3 T1

T1 lines provide the very best Internet connections and perfect for businesses running external databases, VPNs, VOIP (Voice Over IP) and other applications that demand higher quality lines, lower transmit delays (latency) and faster response to trouble tickets. Not all businesses require the full bandwidth of a T1 (1540/1540) however they do still need the other benefits of this particular type of Internet connection. We've had many customers ask for a solution between a half and a full T1. After much consideration we've decided to make available a 1000k T1 (2/3 T1). This T1 operates at the full transmit speed of a T1 (lower latency than DSL, which means data actually transfers faster) and is also symmetric with 1000kbps (kilobits per second) download and 1000kbps upload simultaneously, which means if you are uploading and downloading at the same time at maximum speed, this line can handle 2000kbps.

4. New Customer DSL offers have been updated

If you are a dialup customer and have considered DSL but were waiting for a reason to change, now is a great time to call Red Shift about moving up to DSL. Our fall promotions are available now. Please call us at 831-655-8710 (Monterey area) or 831-755-7700 (Salinas area).

5. Switching phone companies affects DSL!

One of the problems many customers have been encountering lately is losing their DSL service when they switch telephone providers (i.e., switching to Vonage, MCI etc.). If you have DSL through Red Shift, you must keep at least the minimum at&t phone service on the phone number that the DSL line resides on. This is because the DSL frequency on those copper wires is leased by Red Shift from at&t and the Red Shift lease disappears if you cancel the at&t phone service - at&t doesn't keep a DSL-only lease on a line they are not providing with phone service.

If you change to another phone carrier on that line, this cancels the lease and the Red Shift DSL signal is turned off. At some point in the future at&t may allow these leases to ride independently of the phone carrier that is on the physical line, but that is not assured.

6. Domain phishing - be aware of unscrupulous mailings

If you get a solicitation in the mail for your domain name, particularly one asking you for payment, be very careful. Make sure that the bill or solicitation is from the company that originally registered your domain. If it isn't and you sign up for any of their offers, you will almost certainly lose access to your website and your email until the problem can be fixed, which can take many days or weeks to resolve. If you are in a position where you are not sure what to do, please give us a call - especially if you registered your domain through Red Shift.