Web Server Upgrade, Part 5

Are you sick of hearing about my mis-adventures yet?

I've got more to talk about, and if you want to keep informed about the status of the web site and newsletter delivery, you'll have to read up on it. So, here goes:

The current host will literally pull the plug on the (current) web server effective November 30th which is at the end of the 30-day "money back guarantee" period. Access to the infopackets web site might be interrupted temporarily until the rest of the Internet catches up to par with my nameserver update. If you don't know what a nameserver is, or if you want to know how web site propagation works, you should read part 2 of the Web Server Upgrade article.

The plug was already pulled

I requested cancellation on server last night. When I woke up earlier today, I read an email which stated that the infopackets web server was disassembled. The host company actually ripped out the hard drive from the server and put it aside for safe-keeping!

In all, the server was out of commission for 3 hours. I mentioned I needed time to propagate my nameserver, and didn't want to cancel "right away" -- but I guess someone overlooked this minuscule detail and put an order in to stop service.

Things are half-in-the-air for now with the (current) server, although there is occasional packet loss due to over-bandwidth consumption. This problem *should* definitely be resolved with the new server. At this point, I'm so depressed over what has happened in the past month that I don't want to jinx anything by making promises.

Only 204 emails waiting in my Inbox

I've been pretty busy the last month writing / customizing scripts for the web site, and I'm a wee-bit behind on emails. My next feat at web-scripting (programming) will be aimed at an email-management system. I've got so many emails that I get on a daily basis that it makes sorting / prioritizing emails difficult. And, because the infopackets web site is "popular", any email address related to the infopackets.com web site is a spam-target for email harvesters.

Side note: An email harvester is a program that bounces from web site to web site and collects anything that looks like an email address, then puts it into a huge database. The database is then used by a spammer to fire out advertisements. It's pretty safe to say that having a popular web site would increase the chance of getting on a harvester's list because it is most likely that other web sites would have a link which points to a popular web site, such as infopackets.com.

My new program (when complete) will most likely eliminate 99% of spam I'm receiving. The idea will be to assign a [SPAMTAG] header of some sort to the subject line or body of all incoming emails. I will then set up a filter system with Outlook Express and have it automatically delete all emails that do not contain the [SPAMTAG] signature. I honestly can't take credit for the idea behind my program, because I saw it being used somewhere else in an email that was sent to me a while back.