1)first of all, all invoices are posted in helpdesk at:

http://www.singaporewebhosting.com/customer/

when you receive invoice reminder or would like to check past orders or invoices, pls login to helpdesk above. pls refer to our original welcome email (that we sent to you when you signed up for our service) for username and password.

if you forgot your username/password, please email us password reset request from original listed account owner’s email address. pls note, only the listed account owner’s email address will be accepted due to obvious security reasons.

2)after logging in, you will find a summary of your account. go to invoices section by clicking on the Invoices button at the top:

you will then find all invoice, paid, due or overdue, listed on invoices page:

if there’s invoice due or overdue that you would like to make payment for, click on the View Invoice botton next to the invoice itself, see screen capture above.

clicking the View Invoice button will take you to the details page of that invoice. you will find invoiced items, total amount and payment instructions. if you want to pay by cheque or bank transfer, just follow the instructions.

there’s also credit card payment link button with text “PayPal Payments” on it. PayPal is the credit card payment processing service we use:

if you would like to pay by credit card, click on the PayPal payment button and enter your credit card info on PayPal page:

PayPal is an eBay company, so it’s safe to make credit card payment via PayPal. we have been using it for years and are happy with the service.

hope it helps.

here’s the announcement:

http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/registrars/msg04682.html 

just received from our registrars that the price increases go into affect on October 12, 2007.

monopoly is really bad

rushing to make changes to our web pages…

China is an isolated island when email is concerned at this moment. Apparently someone “up there” behind the routers/switches is tweaking something and GFW has gone wild.

We have customers in China reporting that they have been facing difficulties accessing emails hosted on our servers from yesterday. No issue found on our servers. No client from other countries is having any problem.

We thought, well, this is just another temporary connection issue in China, caused by GFW as usual. Then I found stunning news from most of the major hosting providers in China and realized it’s totally screwed up, big time.

Here’s announcement from the biggest host in China, xinnet.com:

Translation:

Drea Email Users,

We have detected unknown technical problems with international gateway which may cause these problems:

xinnet email users receive bounced back error emails while sending emails to overseas domains, bounced back email could indicate:

1)Connected to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx but connection died. (#4.4.2)
I’m not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

2)xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 551 User not local; please try <forward-path>
Giving up on xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

We’re actively reporting the issue to related Internet organizations and authorities, and will inform you once it’s solved.

We aplogize for inconvenience caused, thank you for understanding.

Now, annoucement from 2nd largest host of China, net.cn:

This one is more entertaining:

Dear net.cn Email Users,

Starting from July 16th, we have received reports from corporate mail users that large amount of emails sent to overseas are bounced back, with error messages:

1）I’m not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

2）<xxx@xxx.com>: 551 User not local; please try <forward-path>

After caredul investigation, we found this in our logfile:

Connected to remote host, but connection died. (#4.4.2)

which means, the remote server disconnected without giving a reason.

Currently we are not able to know the exact reason, but we suspect that emails are blocked by unknown technism on top of SMTP protocol, because many hosting providers are having the same problem. Together with other providers, we have reported the issue to related Internet organizations and authorities, and will inform you once it’s solved. Thank you for you patience.

The most entertaining announcement is from 35.com:

I translate part of it here:

3)While sending email to overseas, the other party receives text “aaazzzaaazzz” only in email content. —– isn’t it funny? no, this is not in their announcement.

5)When someone overseas sends you email, you receive text “aaazzzaaazzz” only in email content. —– hey, at least it’s fair huh?

6)When you send email to overseas or someone overseas sends you email, the email received is blank.

So at 35.com, we suggest that you write email in simplified Chinese and simplify your email content, put body content in Word or PDF format, zip it using winrar and send it as attachment.

Ouch! Let’s shoot some videos and upload to youtube, you can communicate that way as well…

More announcements:

163：http://vip.163.com/vip/notice.html

sina：http://mail.sina.net/notice/050701.html

TOM：http://vip.tom.com/popup/070717.html

21CN：http://mail.21cn.com/banner/popunder_20070717_corp.html

263： http://gmail.263.net/news1-0.html

Many of my friends in China told me that they have been not able to access blogspot.com from 20 Mar afternoon. Users of all most all ISPs, China Telecom, China Netcom, China Tietong, CERNET, are all experiencing difficulty accessing blogspot.

Looks like a nation-wide block.

Trace route timed out from certain core router of China Telecom.

I don’t think it’s permanent block as this is not first time that Google services are blocked in China. Even google.com are blocked every now and then.

It must be a tough time for those in China who’re using Google blogger. But seems like people are used to it now…

Hey, PR (not PageRank) guys in Google, it’s your showtime !

I have been receiving bounced back messages from email addresses I never sent to. When I look at the bounced back message, it mentions failed delivery of emails I didn’t send in the first place.

And the bounced back message says the original email was sent from my domain:

somebullshitnamehere[at]xxxxx.com

xxxxx.com being my domain name. That’s why I received the bounced back.

The original messages are pure spam.

Looks like someone is using my domain/email address to send out spam emails? How can I stop it?

the bad news is, you can do nothing about it. neither can we do anything. in fact, nobody can stop that, except the spammers themselves.

the good news is, the spams were NOT sent from your domain/email account, therefore you do not need to worry.

then why the spam emails look like from your domain and why you receive those bounces?

simply put, spammers forged the email header data. yes spammers can forge, or spoof, email header to make the email look like from your domain while actually it’s not.

i would not go into details on how to forge email header, for obvious reason :-), just let you know that email header forgery is very easy. i could easily send an email that looks like from bill.gates@microsoft.com, while of course i do not have access to bill.gates@microsoft.com email address. the best part is, Bill Gates has no way to stop me doing this.

most email client software allow you to view full email header.

in Outlook Express, right-click on the email, select “properties”, a new window would pop up, click on “details” tab, then you will see the full header data, which should include these typical fields:

From: who the message is from. this is the easiest to forge. email client shows this field as sender.

Reply-To: the address to which reply should be sent. often absent from the message as it is the same as Form: field most of the time. easily forgeable as well.

Return-Path: the email address for return mail. same as Reply-To:.

Message-ID: a unique string assigned by the mail system when the message is first created. also forgeable in most cases, but requires a little more knowledge.

Received: these are the most reliable lines in the header. they form a list of all nodes through which the message have to travel in order to reach destination. they are unforgeable after the point where it was injected. but up to that point, they may be forgeries.

Received: lines are read from bottom to top, the last non-forged Received: line is where the mail originated.

below is such a bounced back message i just received 5 minutes ago, which includes the header of original spam email:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mail.strathcom.com.
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.

<dewhcgme@kingswaylexustoyota.com>:
Sorry, no mailbox here by that name. (#5.1.1)

— Below this line is a copy of the message.

Return-Path: <ubkpng@singaporewebhosting.com>
Received: (qmail 1194 invoked from network); 22 Feb 2007 18:18:15 -0000
Received: from 80.192.76.241 by mail.strathcom.com (envelope-from <ubkpng@singaporewebhosting.com>, uid 502) with qmail-scanner-2.01
(clamdscan: 0.88.5/2081.
Clear:RC:0(80.192.76.241):.
Processed in 0.05686 secs); 22 Feb 2007 18:18:15 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO 80-192-76-241.cable.ubr13.edin.blueyonder.co.uk) (80.192.76.241)
by mail.strathcom.com with SMTP; 22 Feb 2007 18:18:12 -0000
Received: (qmail 18642 invoked from network); Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:18:20 +0000
Received: from unknown (HELO tawfij) (124.193.41.128)
by 80-192-76-241.cable.ubr13.edin.blueyonder.co.uk with SMTP; Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:18:20 +0000
Message-ID: <45DDDE6C.7000802@singaporewebhosting.com>
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:18:20 +0000
From: Matty <ubkpng@singaporewebhosting.com>
User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 (Windows/20061207)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: dewhcgme@kingswaylexustoyota.com
Subject: secession mantel

so, the From: and Return-Path: fields are forged. a spammer, pretending to be Matty using ubkpng@singaporewebhosting.com, sent an spam email to dewhcgme@kingswaylexustoyota.com.

domain kingswaylexustoyota.com is hosted by strathcom.com:

Received: (qmail 1194 invoked from network); 22 Feb 2007 18:18:15 -0000
Received: from 80.192.76.241 by mail.strathcom.com

at least these two lines are real. a server at strathcom.com received the email and bounced it back as dewhcgme@kingswaylexustoyota.com does not exist.

there’re a few other Received: lines, none of which has anything to do with our domain or IP address.

this line is interesting:

Received: from unknown (HELO tawfij) (124.193.41.128)

IP 124.193.41.128 may reveal where the spamer is.

Message-ID: is also forged/fake.

we do not have a Matty here and ubkpng@singaporewebhosting.com does not exist. since we enabled catch-all account, we received the bounced back message sent to ubkpng@singaporewebhosting.com.

spammers are bad and they lie…

default email account is also known as “catch-all account”.

the default/catch-all email account would “catch” any mail that is sent to an invalid email address for your domain. all mail that is sent to an address that does not exist will go to the default email account.

for example, lets say your domain is xyzcompany.com, main hosting account username is xyzcom, you have set up three email addresses, aaa@xyzcompany.com, bbb@xyzcompany.com, ccc@xyzcompany.com.

when someone sends email to, say, ddd@xyzcompany.com (which does not exist), the email will be delivered to the so called default/catch-all email account.

who would send email to email address that does not exist? well, sometimes that could be a typo, or more frequently, spam emails. those spammers scan domain records and then send spams to common-names@any-existing-domain-names, for example, john@yourdomain, alice@yourdomain, sales@yourdomain, etc.

so there’s pros and cons to have default/catch-all account. you would not miss any email even if your partner mis-spelled your name, however, the majority (more than 99.9%), in default account are spam emails.

we provide the facility. you decide if you would like to use it yourself.

how to enable/disable default/catch-all account?

you can enable/disable/configure default account yourself in control panel.

1)login to your control panel, (cpanel), at http://www.yourdomain:2082

2)go to “mail” section, the very first icon

3)click on “default address”

4)click on “set default address”

5)you would see “send all unrouted email for your domain to:” and a text box where you can specify what to do with those unrouted emails. you have 4 options here:

A- enter any real email address in the text box so that the unrouted emails would be forwarded to that real email address

B- enter your main hosting account username, for example “xyzcom” (for example above), so that unrouted emails will be delivered to default account on our server. more details on how to access it below.

C- enter “:blackhole:” in text box so that unrouted emails will be discarded. not recommended as the sender would not receive any bounced back or error message if the sender is not spammer and just made typo.

D- enter “:fail: no such address here” in the text box so that unrouted emails will be bounced.

how to access default account on server if it’s enabled?

among the 4 options, case C and D are considered default-account-disabled as the unrouted emails are gone, not stored anywhere for you to access.

for case A, you can find the forwarded emails in that real email address.

for case B, there is an email account, the default account, on the server, however it’s not a real email address. you can access the default email account using main hosting account username as email account username.

in example above, use “xyzcom” as email account username in your Outlook or Outlook Express settings. password is the main hosting account password.

as you can see in this post on email account setup, you should use entire email address as username for normal email address/account.

so you can access the default account in the same way as normal email account, but the username is very different.

some clients find their account over-quota but could not find where the emails/files are. in many such cases, there’re tons of emails in the default account.

obviously if someone gathers email addresses from forums, newsgroups, web sites, etc. using email address harvesting software and sends emails to the list of email addresses trying to sell his earn-money-quick-nonsense, pills, lose weight products, drugs, your-email-won-price-scam, enlarge-certain-part-of-body…

same if you buy a list of email addresses from somebody else.

that’s absolutely spam. if anyone sends out that kind of email that way, we remove the account without second thought. and the spammer is responsible for any damage made to our server, IP, other web sites.

but in this post, i would like to address such situation that some people may not think it’s spamming while actually it is spamming.

someone may think that sending emails to a list of people is not spamming as long as there’s opt-out options. that is WRONG.

you see, there’s a difference between what’s considered as spamming by law and what’s considered as spamming by real people and ISPs.

according to Singapore law and CAN-SPAM ACT of 2003 (US anti-spam law), you won’t go to jail if you provide opt-out options in the emails (provided you comply to all other items in the law).

however all ISPs, web hosting providers, spamcop, etc. consider it as spamming as long as it is not opt-in.

in other words, you can only send emails to people who actually requested to receive email from you. for example, he signed up for your newsletter by filling out the signup form on your web site himself.

send subscribers what they subscribe for, your newsletter, i mean, your real useful newsletter. don’t send them ads after they sign up, it’s abusive and would be considered as spam.

and you have to be able to prove that, his full name, date of subscription, his IP address, logfile, etc.

as serious web hosting provider, we follow how ISPs, spamcop and hosting industry define spamming.

if you send emails to people who did not request to receive email from you, even though you give opt-out option, it is still spam. we will terminate account that sends spam email. and the client who sends spam will be responsible for it.

pls do not argue that it’s not against the law. it’s a clear cut. sending emails to people who did not request the email is spam and we do not allow that on our servers.

but then, if someone’s activity is considered as spamming by law, it won’t be as simple as getting hosting account terminated. the spammer will be sued and in trouble, big time trouble.

we have zero tolerance to spam for all our client’s interests. if anyone send spam complaint to spamcop against a domain, we have to take action to secure our servers, our IP addresses, and all our clients’ businesses.

so, if you run a mailing list, or newsletter, or something like that, make sure it’s opt-in. double opt-in is better.

do not send mass mailing is best.

well, i was deadly wrong.

i just went to Prada web site and was wondering where to go next. i was staring at a black belt with white text “PRADA” on it, below it there is a picture of a very cool lady (looks like 3D computer generated, is it?) holding prada handbag. no other text, nothing to click, nowhere to go.

hey, it’s PRADA, it’s not a under construction site that the boy next door just put up.

then i noticed there’s popup window blocked warning message on top of the browser window. well, yes i use a few popup blocker including firefox extension, google toolbar, yahoo toolbar. after disabling all popup blocking, reloaded prada.com, phew, i see a popup window which leads to pradaparfums.com.

i have to say honestly, it’s fantastic Flash web site, whole site in Flash.

now go to google and search for “prada handbag”, prada itself is not in top 10, not on 2nd page either, not even on 3rd page.

how about “prada shoes” in google? same.

yahoo? go try it.

it’s ranked at no. 1 for “prada” though, i guess many web sites link to them using “prada” as linking text. i link to them in this post as well.

now take a look at how many pages from prada.com have been indexed by google, then click on the 2nd page listed “Prada Women Fragrance” (you’ve visited homepage right?), a black screen to me. 3nd listing “Prada Perfume Fragrance“? same, a blank page in black color with nothing on it!

if you view source of the page, there’re codes. but the text are hidden by CSS.

this is interesting. imagine you produce and sell Adapr handbag and shoes, can you afford designing your web site this way?!

used properly, it can be cool, eye-catching, and useful to visitors. otherwise, it’s often counterproductive.

my take on this is, it can be used very well as part of your web site, for example, a flash banner, a multimedia flash presentation of your products/services, a hi-tech flavor introduction of your company, etc.

a trend i see in the past few months, flash is used as video and audio clip player. video is getting hot nowadays, it gives very personal touch, present your products in a more straightforward way, it can be like a TV commercial, very powerful selling tool. the benifit of using flash to play video or audio on web site is, visitors do not need special plugin, publishers do not have to worry about different video formats.

however, you have to think twice before making your whole web site in flash. many web sites are in fact just flash movies, which i would not recommend.

if you think about it, none of the big guys develops whole web site in flash. there must be a reason. the simplest i can think of, the web site is meant to provide useful information to visitors, not only a cool presentation. how much information can you squeeze into one flash? thousands of pages of valuable product information, guides, tips, articles… no way.

secondly, flash is not indexable by search engines. they’re trying to, but not getting there yet. there’s workaround to feed text version to search engines while displaying flash version to human visitors. although it’s totally ethical, however it’s still cloaking that search engines may not like. search engines use algorithm to rank web pages, not human editors, algorithm, til today, cannot identify the cloaking is ethical or just dirty tricks.

thirdly, flash movie often takes much longer to download, especially if whole web site is built in flash, as it will be a big file. again, there’re workarounds to make flash start playing while still being downloaded. then you need very experienced flash designer.

one last point before i finish this post, many people including myself would click on “back” button whenever they see a flash is downloading as full page, be it intro or whole web site. fair or not, you have to accept it. it’s a habit developed from the old dial-up days.

Amount Year Domain
12,000,000 - 2006 - sex.com
7,500,000 - 1999 - business.com
5,500,000 - 2003 - casino.com
5,000,000 - 2002 - asseenontv.com
5,000,000 - 1999 - korea.com
3,500,000 - 1996 - worldwideweb.com
3,350,000 - 1999 - altavista.com
3,300,000 - 1999 - wine.com
3,000,000 - 1999 - eshow.com
3,000,000 - 1999 - loans.com
2,750,000 - 2004 - creditcards.com

good domain name costs millions.

but good short crispy domain name is hard to find nowadays. in the past, i recommended clients to always consider keyword rich domain names when short one-or-two-word domain is not available.

for example, if webhosting.com.sg is taken, and yes it’s taken long time ago, go for singaporewebhosting.com, if singaporewebhosting.com is taken, you can even consider bestsingaporewebhosting.com. you get the idea.

the reason was, keyword rich domain name is descriptive and may help search engine ranking a bit. it’s long and ugly, but the problem is, the shorter ones are taken. since you have to get a long domain, why not make it keyword rich?

now things have changed. and i’ve changed my mind.

always go for a brandable domain name. something easy to read out loud, easy to type into the address bar, easy to remember, something short.

so instead of bestsingaporewebhosting.com, get, for example, i did not check availability of domain name below, hostingstudio.com.sg, wehost.com.sg, mysghosting.com, trustedsg.com, etc. or maybe your unique company name which does not include “web” or “hosting” at all.

why? provide clients convenience and quality service, not anything else. brandable domain name is good for visitors, and in the end will be good for your business.