newsletter #06

– Spam emails that ask for passwords
DO NOT GIVE OUT YOUR EMAIL PASSWORD TO ANYONE; not even to the Espiv crew. This is a very serious matter! Oftentimes people give out their password to incoming emails that are completely spam bullshit. We have repeated this many times already: no one should give out their email password to anyone! No one must give out their email password; not under any circumstances; not even to (people that appear to be) the Espiv crew.
We are trying very hard to eliminate spam messages, but it is not so simple, nor can we ever stop or block them completely. Thus we say it one more time: DO NOT GIVE OUT THE PASSWORD FOR YOUR EMAIL ACOUNT TO ANYONE! In case some of you have been tricked in doing so, please change your password immediately right now. If you have any problems, please contact us.

– Change of passwords
It is advisable to not have to be reminded by someone else, but to bear in mind to change your own password for each of your online accounts at regular intervals. Please change passwords for email, mailing lists, discussion forums, blogs, etc. on a regular basis. If you have never changed your password for any espiv service, now it’s time to do it! (Help recommendations on https://espiv.net/howtos/1)

– Mailing lists & Greek
Those of you who have problems in administrating lists (“it’s all Greek to you”) please change the language to English: from https://lists.espiv.net/cgi-bin/mailman/admin/ONOMA_ΛΙΣΤΑΣ/?VARHELP=language/preferred_language you may change the language from Greek to “English (American)” that will appear with question marks, and press the button with more question marks below. We are facing difficulty with the encoding of Greek, and there is no easy solution to it yet. Greek will be disabled in the near future. If you encounter some problems, or you need further instructions etc., please contact us.

– Mailing list archives
We would like to inform you about some changes that we will make over the next few days regarding mailing lists. The lists keep record of discussions and attachments. However, this is space-consuming, and raises difficulties in taking the backup at regular intervals as we do now; also for safety reasons, we decided to delete this particular archive. This archive can be found in the folders of each mailing list, and does not affect what has already been sent to personal email accounts. If you want to download the archive file of discussions to have it stored on your computer, this can be done through the Administration of the mailing list. We will proceed to this deletion in about two weeks, so if you want to download these files you still have time.

– Upgrades to discussion forums (smf)
Those of you who maintain discussion forums should proceed with any upgrades that the Administration section informs of. This is very important especially for open/public forums. If you experience difficulties, please contact us through https://espiv.net/en/node/45

– Backups
Users of espiv services should take regular backups. (Help recommendations on https://espiv.net/howtos/1)

– New security certificates for espiv.net & espivblogs.net
We have been convinced that we need to become revisionists and change certs 🙂 We have finally passed on to commercial certificates, so now all pages of *espiv.net and *espivblogs.net have a certificate that is accepted by 99% of browsers. This means that Mozilla or Chrome will no longer pop out a warning message whenever one visits a secure page on Espiv. If browsers still “complain” for certain pages on Espiv, please contact us. This change has also been made in espiv email. For those using some mail client like Thunderbird the same applies, as with browsers. It should not be asking you to accept the certificate when connecting with the Espiv imap/smtp.

– Planet.espiv.net

Over the past few years, we have maintained a “planet” on espiv.net, a page with the latest news (rss) of all the pages hosted on espiv.net. Nowadays, the bulk of material has become very large –and our time very limited– to renew (aka search pages and add them on the planet). This is why we will not maintain it in the same mode as before. Whoever does not see their page on the planet (http://planet.espiv.net – http://planet.espiv.net/es) can communicate with the administration team to request their page be added (or removed). You may email us at support@espiv.net, and cite the name of your webpage (e.g. Espivblogs) as well as the link of your rss feed (e.g. http://espivblogs.net/feed).