System Status Blog

March 28, 2013 – Hmail Problems Update

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Angela Welfare

Recently, we’ve had serious disruptions to email service for our customers. We are very sorry about the impact this has had on so many of you. In light of what has happened, we wanted to provide some additional information and provide more details about the steps we’re taking to resolve the issues and make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Over the last week, several of our customers’ email addresses were hacked and used to send out massive amounts of spam emails. This caused our company to be placed on multiple blacklists and significantly impacted Hmail email performance for all our customers. These blacklists, such as Spamcop and SORBS, are used by other providers to determine what emails are allowed to be received on their servers.

We disabled the hacked accounts and eliminated the source of the spam. We are still actively working to clear our reputation and get removed from all blacklists. Unfortunately, getting off of a blacklist is a complicated process and some have a waiting period to ensure that no more spam is being sent out from our servers. We are extremely sorry about the impact this has had on our small business customers. We are doing everything we can to get removed from all blacklists as soon as possible and our goal is to be completely operational over the next few days.

If you are sending email and receiving a bounce-back message that your email is being rejected it is because the recipient’s email host is using one of the blacklists that we are currently on. While we continue to work on being removed from all blacklists, you can attempt to contact their email administrator and ask to have your specific email addresses placed on their whitelist, allowing your email into their system. If their email administrator needs any information from our Hmail administrator, please refer them to mail-block@homesteadsupport.com.

Although there is currently no threat to the email accounts of the rest of our customers, we need all of our customers to review the strength of their email passwords. A strong email password contains upper and lower-case letters, numbers, and special characters and will make your email very secure and thwart hackers attempting to gain access. It’s also important to keep different passwords across your many online accounts and change them every six months.

We are currently implementing changes to our email security policies and spam prevention measures to ensure that this problem does not happen again. We understand that email is the lifeblood for small businesses. We are sorry for the pain and inconvenience this has caused.

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