Phishing and Fraud Attempt

They are good. The Bad Guys, I mean. They create official looking emails that look exactly like your banks email. But, of course, since they are 'Bad Guys', any info you give doesn't get to the bank. Well, eventually it does when they use YOUR info to get YOUR money.

Here is the latest example I received last week:

Bank Of America Alert: Online Access Suspension Message

Bank of America Higher Standards
(note the official logo coming directly from the bank's website)

AOL Spam Block fixed

Email block of mail from our servers to AOL has been removed.

I had to give them a call, and register the servers with AOL. They were pretty responsive, though it's odd that it takes a couple days for them to remove the blocks. Once registered, supposedly we will be notified by AOL if there is a reported issue, instead of them just blocking us.

Site Re-Design

The SevenSages.com website has finally been redesigned!

I've been meaning to get to this for years. Yes, years.

Valid Mails from Yahoo marked as Spam?

It seems some emails from Yahoo.com addresses have been getting marked as SPAM a lot. Obviously, we don't want to block any valid emails from friends and business contacts who might be using Yahoo for email.

The problem isn't our filters. It's Yahoo. We have made some special adjustments for Yahoo, but we just hope Yahoo fixes their issue.

AOL Forwards block (AOL's fault)

It's my fault for the horrible explanation of the AOL block, but the block is AOL's fault.

First, the issue only effects about 15 users, out of thousands of email accounts. If you haven't gotten an email from me, then you are not effected. (I thought there would be more)

Second, it ONLY effected people with an AOL account, who are having their mail forwarded from their website.

Stopping AOL Forwards (clarification)

Seems my horrible writing skills caused some confusion and concern about this announcement:

So... we are going to have to stop all forwarding of email to AOL accounts.

Sorry about that. What I meant to say was, any account automatically forwarding their mail to their aol address will be changed.

For Example:

AOL blocking email again

It seems AOL is blocking email from our servers again.
This is due to AOL allowing it's users to report any mail as SPAM, and AOL blocking NOT the sender, BUT the server it was forwarded from.

So... we are going to have to stop all forwarding of email to AOL accounts.

New Payment Option with Google

Some people have been having trouble trying to pay via our PayPal option. For some reason, their credit cards are not getting verified and authorized.

I was on the phone with PayPal tech support for a couple hours trying to resolve the issue. PayPal has no answer except "try another credit card." So, I told them I'd try another credit card processor --- Google Checkout.