Email & Server issues

Submitted by admin on Sat, 2009-05-16 10:20 My Gallery

The iKolam server has been bogged down due to following problems: Multiple avatar problem & email issues related to spam.

Multiple Avatar Problem:
Some of the active members have many user ids (8 - 10) which they use to interact with others the site. This adds unnecessary burden on the server and of late, the server performance has degraded so badly because of it. We are adding more safeguards in place to prevent this problem. Your userid might be frozen/blocked when the server detects this issue.

Email/Spam Issues:
We have been receiving a spate of chain letters and email spam recently and this has overloaded the iKolam server (which handles our emails too). The server detects such intrusions and freezes the offending accounts (based on the email address from where the spam mail is coming from).

We are letting you know about these problems since this has been consuming a lot of our time and resources. This is an unneeded distraction and would like your help in dealing with them. Following are some guidelines that would help us:
1. Please do not include ikolam email addresses as part of mass mailings that you send out.
2. Because of the server issues, the rangoli backlog is growing even longer. Please refrain from uploading the same kolam again and again. All your submissions are safe and will get uploaded in due course. Remember, we don't have unlimited bandwith and resources to do this work.
3. If you have uploaded a rangoli, please wait for it to get uploaded before uploading another.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

Comments

jkmrao

Sat, 2009-05-16 13:44

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Is there not one name - one e-mail association? That is what most of the yahoo groups
do. If one wants to change it to another id, it is possible. But the real problem
arises when people have accounts under different ids and under different names. It is
quite difficult to find this out except by IP address. Recently I was hit by a
"New shopping" e-mail scam. It stole the address book from my machine and sent it to
all my contacts including yahoo groups. Now I have all my contacts in a separate
file and copy from that. Still I have been banned from the rasikapriya music group.
Now I have to rejoin with a different e-mail address. The funny thing is I received
the same message from another contact after two weeks. But this time no damage was
done as there is no address book. It took nearly three weeks for my computer
to come back to normal. Users beware! Clean with anti-virus anti-worm programs.

Regards! - mOhana

mani

Sat, 2009-05-16 19:18

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Yes; there is a one-to-one relationship between userid and email address. The only way to create multiple accounts is using multiple email addresses, which is unfortunately so easy to create. This causes many problems for us:

1. Excessive use-and-throw accounts tend to artificially inflate the user-base; but burdens the system. A lot of these email accounts become disabled over time, which causes secondary problems.
2. We were quite regularly sending out newsletters and email updates, which has been stopped for a while now. The main reason being the inordinate amount of time it takes to send the mails, because of all the bouncing emails. We have suffered some blacklisting from the main email providers because of this.

We could aggressively check users against IP addresses. But that is not practical, since static IP is not the norm. More over, it is quite conceivable that a lot of our users are from internet cafes and browsing centers, which would tend to have the same IP address.

So, there is no single solution to this problem, except active support and understanding from the users.

Lata

Sun, 2009-05-17 01:20

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Indra, please stop uploading. I see that you already have 6-7 files uploaded until yesterday morning, and you have just uploaded one more?
please read our admin messages.

Lata

Sun, 2009-05-17 01:25

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One more? please stop!

Lata

Sun, 2009-05-17 01:29

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Indra dear, my BP, heart rate is going up, it is 1:30am, and I would like just a few more days to bring our server back to a healthy state. I promise things will be back to normal in one more week, and we wouldn't put any restrictions on uploading, okay?