dawilson

Major kudos to you guys for getting things back up and running again so quickly! This is just another example of the great service I've come to expect from TCH over the years I've been a customer. It's probably a bit early to ask this but do you have any idea how this guy gained entry to so many systems? It would be nice to think that whatever back door he used was closed tight so that this kind of thing becomes a great deal less likely in the future.

Thanks - I'll open a help ticket.

One of my clients has a Joomal 1.5 site (currently 1.5.8 but about to upgrade) and he is claiming that he is unable to install plugins and extensions without manually changing directory permissions to 777. I have various Joomla 1.0 and Wordpress 2.7 sites and have never had any problem with permissions. The only difference I can think of is that I installed the scripts via Fantastico and he did it manually. Is anyone aware of anything that may have been missed during a manual install or which is done in the Fantastico install process that could cause these kinds of problems? I have asked him to back up the site then upgrade to 1.5.9 via Fantastico to see if that solves the problem. Is this liable to help? Thanks in advance for any suggestions, Dave Wilson

Thanks Bruce. It sounds like WordPress is a good idea. I had not seen the site you mentioned, but the following one is a lot less pessimistic so I'll start there. Allegedly it offers a script that will perform the necessary database conversions. http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/2006/03/migra...m_pmachine.html Now all I need to do is convince someone in support to unsuspend my domain long enough for me to (a) save a backup and ( hack pMachine to remove whatever hole the spammers used. This is rather tricky when the domain is suspended.

I realise that this is an old thread but I'm in the same situation and would love some advice. I've been blogging with pMachine for about 4 years now and find it very easy to use. Unfortunately, some spammer decided to use my site to relay their messages and the account was suspended. Given that I will have to hack around in a bunch of unsupported PHP to try to close whichever holes they exploited (as yet, I have no idea), I'm considering using this as an opportunity to transition to WordPress 2.7. The question I have, though, is whether or not this will be worth the effort? Is WP inherently less likely to be a target of spammers and, hence, less likely to cause me to have to wade through lots of someone elses PHP? Given that it is a platform with ongoing support, I assume it is less likely to be attacked successfully but this is merely a guess. Another question I have relates to migrating my pMachine content into WordPress. I've found some scripts that allegedly do this and some other advice on the web but would love to hear first hand from anyone who has done this. How straightforward was the migration and are there any TCH-specific gotchas I should be aware of? Thanks in advance for any advice. Dave

Andy, Many thanks - that's exactly what I was hoping for! Regards, Dave

Andy, Thanks for the offer of help. My main domain is webartz.com. I sent you a Yahoo IM message but you don't seem to be online just now. Regards, Dave

Andy and Don, Thanks for the advice but I have done all these things already. My problem is that my PC (a fast dual Athlon X2) is taking about 10 minutes every couple of hours just downloading and trashing the spam and I would really like to remove this CPU burden. Earthlink used to allow me to trash the spam on the server which was why I was forwarding all my mail there. I was hoping that I could configure SpamBox to do the same thing but it sounds like I am out of luck. Do you know anywhere that I can safely forward all my spam and have it deleted without the possibility of being blacklisted again? :-) Regards, Dave

Bruce, After Earthlink blacklisted me for forwarding mail to my account there, I've switched everything to POP accounts on the TCH server but I am now battling spam again. Even with SpamAssassin enabled, I'm being swamped and want to stop it getting to my client at all. Is there any way to have my spam deleted completely on the server? I've enabled SpamBox but I still need to manually clear it. Given the volume of spam I receive (10 year old email address, posted on many web sites in the early days) I'm concerned that I may have to clear SpamBox about twice a day. Can it be configured as a black hole somehow? I can't see an option on CPanel to let me do this. Thanks, Dave

Thanks for the advice. Rules seem to be: 1. As far as possible, don't forward outside your own domain(s) and 2. Kill the spam using SpamAssassin before forwarding anything that you need to get to an ISP. I will stick with POP accounts on the server for now (my mail client already checks 4 POP accounts so another one or two won't make a difference). Ironically, one of the main reasons I was forwarding to my Earthlink account was that it has a fabulous spam blocker and gave me great statistics on how much crud it was catching. SpamAssassin seems to do a pretty good job now, though, so perhaps this reason isn't valid any more. Apologies if it really was my forwards that caused the problem. I'll post again when the block is lifted.

Can someone who knows how this works give me some guidance on the use of forwards? It appears they should only be used sparingly and not as a replacement for POP accounts on the TCH server yet I find them tremendously useful especially for web design clients who are not tech savvy and have problems configuring their mail client for new POP addresses (using a forward, I can redirect all their mail to their existing ISP mailbox and save them having to do this). In the past, I have forwarded my own email to my ISP since (a) they have a fabulous spam blocker and ( I preferred their webmail interface while travelling. I've been using the same email address for 10 years which was one of the main reasons for getting my own domain in the first place but is also one reason behind the volume of spam I receive. I've shifted to POP accounts now and SpamAssassin seems to be doing a reasonable job so far so at least mail is no longer being lost. I'll keep talking to Earthlink in the hope that they will remove the block but it sounds as if I am in for a lengthy discussion.

Dick, I've been forwarding email to Earthlink for 3 years with no problems. The amount of spam has actually decreased recently so it surprises me that all of a sudden this should be a problem. I had a similar problem a couple of years ago when TCH decided to disallow forwards to AOL for the same reason. In that case, it affected many of my web design clients who use AOL. This time, it only affects me and one client. Maybe it's time that TCH finally bit the bullet and disabled all mail forwarding? This would be a pain for me but a lot less pain than having the service eroded over time as more and more ISPs with unintelligent mail filters decide to blacklist the last hop server rather than the original sender. The way things are going, email is going to be a useless "tool" within about 5 years. It's a shame, really, since it used to be so handy. Regards, Dave W PS: I switched every Earthlink forward I had to POP yesterday and sent all relevant info to Earthlink themselves. Block is still in place and no reply has been received.

In case anyone else spends multiple hours trying to figure out why they are no longer receiving mail forwarded from TCH-hosted domains to Earthlink, you may be interested to know that Earthlink have decided that server390 is a source of spam and have blacklisted the server :-( I've raised support requests at both Earthlink and TCH but the problem is still not resolved. Mail sent or forwarded from server390 results in: host mx1.earthlink.net [209.86.93.226]: 550 550 Dynamic/zombied/spam IPs blocked. Write blockedbyearthlink@abuse.earthlink.net Regards, Dave Wilson PS: If anyone has experience of getting Earthlink to remove a blacklist entry for an IP address that appears in no public spam source databases, I would love to hear from you.

Just in case anyone is interested in a bit of IrfanView trivia, the program actually generates quite a bit of traffic to TCH. If you try to play a movie file using IrfanView but don't have the right codec installed, IrfanView refers to you www.fourcc.org which is a site I host on TCH which offers information on PC video software. I moved to TCH specifically to keep this site up and running since my previous host crashed often resulting in a lot of irate email from IrfanView users. Regards, Dave Wilson

Rob, I discovered some of your posts about osCommerce after posting my original question and looked into it. It looks to be ideal for my application but it has one problem that means I may not be able to use it. I spent an hour or so looking but I could not find any documentation on the page template model. I found loads of design houses selling completed templates but couldn't find out how to edit and create templates myself. Shop-script (the free version) seems to offer all the facilities I need and uses a standard PHP template model that seems to be pretty well documented. Since this is very important for me (I need the shopping area to use the same templates as the rest of the existing site) and the learning curve looks a lot easier to get over (given that I have found documentation for shop-script but would have to reverse engineer osCommerce), it still looks a better bet. If, however, I find good documentation on developing osCommerce templates, then this would likely swing the balance since osCommerce does support a lot of features that may become useful in future. Can you offer any pointers? Thanks again, Dave