LuxSci Chronology: Upgrades and News

• User policy changes: Domain Policy and user lists can now be downloaded into an .xls spreadsheet format, including Exempt User Lists, Recipient Deny Lists, Anti-Spam Exempt Lists and Users Allow/Deny Lists. Also, after creating Spam Content Groups, messages that contain Spam keywords will be considered as Spam and put in a user's Quarantine. With this feature both current content keywords and Spam content filtering keywords can both be defined
• User management changes: Administrators can adjust filtering policy actions for users, and can allow users to determine Spam reporting options. The upgrade also allows for the batch deletion of users.
• Time zone management: Users are now able to select a preferred Time Zone setting, which will then apply to all information with time stamps in the portal.
• Internationalization: Non-English characters within incoming email messages are decoded and displayed, and current content and Spam content filtering keywords in other languages are now supported.

LuxSci has made several updates to its facility for auditing user activity:

• The "Login History Reports" section of "My Profile" has been renamed "Activity Auditing Reports" to reflect the more general nature of the reports that are contained therein.
• LuxSci now tracks messages sent via WebMail. You will find a history of email messages that you have sent from WebMail under the WebMail reports in the "Activity Auditing Reports" section of "My Profile". This allows you and your account administrators to see when and how many messages you have sent from WebMail, and to how many recipients these messages were sent. As a user, you can also view the subjects of these messages in the auditing reports; however, for privacy reasons, the message subjects are suppressed in the account administrator and technical support versions of your reports.
• LuxSci now tracks the messages sent from your web sites. You can view a history of the messages sent from each of your web sites under the Web Site Configuration page for each of your sites. Depending on what kind of web site script sent the messages, these reports may track the IP addresses of the web site visitors that caused the messages to be sent and the path to the scripts that sent the messages. These reports allow you to see when and how your site is sending email messages and can be used to make sure that it is not being hijacked to send undesired email messages.
• LuxSci now tracks the messages sent by users of its web servers. This includes messages sent by users with shell access, by cron jobs running as individual users, and all other user-specific messages originating on the web servers that are not associated with a specific web site. If you have any kind of web server access, you can view reports of your web server message sending history under the "Activity Auditing Reports" section of "My Profile".

Web sites will be limited to sending no more than 500 email messages per day. The web site owner, his account administrator, and technical support will be warned once the web site has sent more than 250 messages in one day and if the web site exceeds its limit.

Users with shell or cron access will be limited to sending no more than 200 email messages per day. Both the user, his account admin, and technical support will be warned once the user has sent more than 100 messages in one day and if the user exceeds his/her limit.

Once a user or web site exceeds its limit, it will be blocked from sending additional email messages for 24 hours.

The sending limits on web sites can be raised without any additional fees if necessary. If you think that your web site may need to send more than 500 email messages in one day, you should make a support ticket explaining why and requesting a higher limit.

These user and web site sending limits and warnings will NOT go into effect for several weeks. In the mean time, we will be watching user and web site email usage and contacting those users or sites that would have reached these limits so that we can adjust the limits for web sites that legitimately need to send more messages before the limits go into effect for real.

Please feel free to review your user and web site email sending histories as they accrue via the auditing reports and to make a support ticket if you have any questions about these limits.

Technical Note: Our web servers now utilize the special environment variable "SMTPAUTH" to authorize and track your web sites' outbound email usage. Tampering with or removing this environment variable will result in either greatly reduced sending limits or the complete failure of all outbound email to be sent (once the limits are imposed). This is not an issue for PHP scripts, but can be an issue in Perl and other CGI scripts if you modify the environment passed to sendmail. You can tell if you have a problem with this by looking at your web site's email sending reports; scripts with this problem will not have their sent messages recorded there.