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What does the "NPO" in many EE service names mean?
NPOGroups:
Spam, Viruses, and Delivery Errors:
Other Technical questions:
Billing and Payments:
Best Practices:
What does the "NPO" in many EE service names mean?
It's an abbreviation for Non-Profit Organization, which describes most of
our clients. (We're geeks, we use acronyms for everything.) Non-US
residents may be more familiar with the acronym NGO, for Non-Governmental
Organization, which refers to basically the same sector.
Why does the list server say I'm not subscribed when I know I am?
You are probably using an address that's different than the one that's
actually subscribed to the list -- this tends to happen especially when
people forward mail from one address
to another, or else when they have their email software set up to check
multiple accounts. To find the subscribed address, view the "Full Headers"
(described below) of a message you've
received from the list, and look for the one called Return-Path, usually
among the first listed. It will look like this:
Return-Path: <listname-owner+adamb=electricembers.net@npogroups.org>
Our list server encodes the subscriber's address within the return address,
in this case the recipient adamb@electricembers.net, beginning
after the + sign and with the @ sign replaced by =. So this gives
the subscribed address,
and it is from that address that any list subscription change requests
must come, in order for the list server to know who you are. If you
post a message or send a subscription request from another address, even a
minor variation like adamb@mail.electricembers.net, the list server
won't connect it with the subscription and won't know how to help you.
Can I receive daily digests instead of every message?
Yes -- see the NPOGroups Users Guide.
Why can't I post to my NPOGroups list?
The most common reason is because you're attempting to post from an address
that is not the one that's registered as a subscriber or owner/moderator of this
list. If you are just a subscriber, not a list owner/moderator, and are being rejected
as a non-subscriber, find your true subscribed address with the instructions
above.
If you're an owner/moderator, login to the list's admin page and check the
list of owner/moderator addresses in the list's General settings.
If you are a list owner of a newsletter
(to which unprivileged subscribers cannot post) and you're getting a
rejection message that says posting is not allowed, it may also be because
you are listed only as an owner, not as a moderator. The two roles can be
separate, and only moderators can post to restricted lists, so you'll need to
add yourself in the group's Moderators section. See the
privileges section of the
NPOGroups Administrator's Guide for more details.
Why is the message footer missing from my list messages or found in a
separate attachment?
Message footers by default are added to all list messages on NPOGroups,
but there is a limitation in the software: For plaintext messages, it can
append the footer to the end of the message, but for HTML formatted messages,
it can only attach the footer as a separate file. This limitation is because
of the inherent ambiguity in inserting new text into a document that already
has HTML formatting with unknown layout and possibly unclosed formatting
tags -- the only safe way to add the footer to HTML is in an attachment.
So, if you're not seeing any message footer or if you're seeing an
attachment called "message-footer.txt" instead of having it appended to
the message body, it's because the messages posted to your list are in
HTML format. If your group is a newsletter and only one or a few people
can post to it, you could manually copy the default message footer's
information into every message before distribution in order to have it show
up within the message body. If this is a discussion group, then the only
way to make the footers show up in the message body is to get all subscribers
to post in plaintext, no HTML formatting.
What does the bounce score mean? Why is it sometimes zero?
Subscribers appear in the Bouncing Subscribers table when a list message
to them is rejected by their mail server. But the Bounce Score displayed
in the table is not just the number of bounces; it's calculated from a
formula that depends on the number of bounces, the severity of the bounces,
and the frequency of bounces compared to the frequency of traffic on the list.
Also, bounces are purged from the system when they're 30 days old, so that
data is only accumulated over the last 30 days. If a subscriber has a temporary
(low-severity) bounce once every month or two on a list that gets a lot of
traffic, their bounce score may show up as zero.
If the most recent bounce date shown for a subscriber in the table is older
than the most recent traffic on the list, then it must have been a temporary
bounce and they must have successfully received later messages. To see more
detail of why someone bounced, click their address in the list and look at
the Status line, which will say something like:
Delivery not authorized, message refused (5.7.1)
This is the actual rejection message from their mail server, and it should
give some idea (however cryptic) of why the message was bounced. To try
to see more detail, you can click the View Last Bounce link below that line,
which will show the rejected message in its entirety.
Usually you can ignore the Bouncing Subscribers table, and people will either
have their status reset after 30 days or be removed automatically from the list if their
bounce scores climb high enough. If you see that there are a lot of temporary
bouncers on there and you want to clear them out, you can select them all and hit
the Reset Errors button to give them a clean slate. Or if they've been bouncing
for a long time and their bounce scores are remaining low because of the type of
bounces and the list's traffic pattern, they'll never reach the threshhold to be
automatically unsubscribed, so you can select them all and hit the Delete Selected
Email Addresses button to unsubscribe them from your list.
How do I report missed spams/viruses or real mail tagged incorrectly as spam/virus?
These are two different cases.
- Missed (untagged) spam or virus
Our filtering system is more accurate than most (eg. Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL), but
it does occasionally make mistakes: around 1% of spam may slip through
untagged. We accept this level of false negatives in order to avoid the
risk of false positives, and usually it's a temporary advantage on the
spammers' or virus-writers' side until the scanning software and databases
catch up. New viruses in particular are almost always caught within a matter
of hours. But if you receive something unwanted that wasn't tagged, you can
forward it to us as an attachment, as described below, to the following
addresses:
- Missed spam: Forward as an attachment to: report-spam (at) electricembers (dot) net
- Missed virus: Forward as an attachment to: help (at) electricembers (dot) net
If your email software allows it, you can forward any number of spams at
once as attachments on a single message. These reports will contribute to
the training of the Bayesian spam database to improve its accuracy.
- Legitimate mail wrongly tagged as spam or virus
In the less common case of false positives, we always want to know about that so that we can tune our
filtering system to eliminate these instances. If a message is tagged as a
virus, it will have an NPOShield attachment
that describes the reason for the identification and gives instructions on
notifying us and retrieving the original message from quarantine. If a
message is falsely tagged as spam, you should forward it to our help address
as an attachment, so that we can see all the extra header info we need.
To forward as an attachment in most popular email clients, see
these instructions. However, for MS Outlook, instead of their back-door
technique we recommend this procedure:
Forward as an attachment in Outlook
- Select Tools | Options... from the menu.
- Under the Preferences tab, click E-mail Options....
- Make sure "Attach original message" is selected under "When forwarding a message."
- Click OK, then OK again, and forward the message as usual.
Note: If you have our NPOShield or Web/basic email hosting and the problem is just
that you're seeing all the messages with [SPAM] and [VIRUS] tags in your
Inbox, you simply need to set up automatic filtering.
Why am I receiving hundreds of bounces to
messages I didn't even send?
An interesting quirk of Internet email is that it's possible to send a
message "From:" any email address imaginable. When email was invented in
the early 1980s, there were few concerns about the security and
authenticity of email messages, and that legacy is with us to this day.
In fact, it's so easy to do this, even with normal email programs, that
you can use it to play practical jokes -- were you to go into your email
account properties right now, change your email address there to
"president@whitehouse.gov", and send a message to a friend, they would
think they'd received a message from the president of the USA.
Unfortunately, this technique can be abused by viruses and spammers, at
which point it becomes tremendously irritating instead of funny.
Spammers often send their junk mail "From:" addresses in other people's
domains to confuse the recipients and hide their true source from
anti-spam systems. And spammers have a habit of carelessly sending their
junk messages to thousands of email addresses at a time, many of which may
be old or otherwise invalid. Messages to these invalid addresses bounce
back to the "sender", which means if the spammer has chosen to send
"From:" your address, they come to you. Because of how these messages
arise, this type of junk mail is called "spam backscatter".
So first off, don't worry that your email account or domain name is
compromised or stolen or hacked. We didn't have to hack into the White
House to play the trick described above, and spammers can use your email
address just as easily. Since spammers tend to rotate through many
different From: domains, spam backscatter tends to explode one day and
then disappear for months, so the worst is probably over. But it's still
irritating to receive all this junk.
You may wonder, "Can't something be done about this?" In fact,
something is being done: new enhancements to the Internet's mail protocols
(Sender Policy Framework, Sender
ID and DKIM) are being
finalized and adopted, and will begin to curtail the spoofing of "From:"
addresses, which would take care of most of the problem. But it will be a
while before wide adoption of the new standards takes place, and all we
can do until then is wait.
Why was mail sent to me returned to the sender
with a notice saying they were "greylisted"?
The short version: The sender's mail server is not behaving according to the
standards, in particular the rule that says it should
try again later if it receives a temporary deferral from our server. (Yes,
there are more of these than you would expect, even at big email providers who
should know better.) Their
email provider should fix the problem, but we can also work around it by
whitelisting if necessary.
The long version: Greylisting is our most effective anti-spam measure, and it works
by giving a temporary failure (a 4.x response) the first time a sending server tries a message
from a new sender to a new recipient. All legitimate mail servers should
handle this
temporary failure by deferring the message and trying again later, often
within 15-30 minutes, at which point we accept the message and whitelist the
triplicate of sending server, sender, and recipient, so mail will flow unimpeded
on future attempts. (Mail servers are also fully whitelisted after a
certain number of successful sends from any recipient to any sender on our end.)
Spammers are blocked because their homebrewed spam-sending software
mostly gives up after one attempt, for both technical and economic reasons,
while legitimate mail gets through because the Internet standards (RFCs)
require mail servers to handle these deferrals properly. This amazingly
simple technique eliminates about 90% of spam at the doorstep, without even
having to scan it for spam-like characteristics, while having very little
effect on real mail. See greylisting.org
for more detail.
However, even though the RFCs are the only reason the Internet works and we
need to be able to rely on servers obeying them, occasionally we find that
someone's mail server does not comply with the standard. If that happens
and you get a rejection message, you can let your sender know that they
should contact their email service provider about their server's
non-compliance, but you can also let us know and we'll investigate and take
whatever action is necessary, including manual whitelisting, to allow their
mail through.
Do you have a Web-based control panel for Web/DNS management or one-click application installation?
No, sorry, we don't currently have that sort of interface for DNS or Web
hosting, although we do for the NPOMail, NPOGroups, and NPOShield services,
which are more configuration-intensive on the user end. For most purposes we
believe you won't feel the lack, as you can make any technical requests to us
and have them fulfilled promptly and unfailingly, and with the benefit of our
wide-ranging technical knowledge, which may save you from innocent mistakes.
We do recognize that one-click installation of Web applications (CMSes, blogs,
etc.) is a valuable service, but most of these applications have their own
very easy command-line installers, and we will assist as much as we can if
you run into difficulties.
Which email program can I use?
A wide variety of POP/IMAP email programs will work with our servers, but
we recommend the free, open source, very polished and capable Thunderbird (from the
makers of the Firefox Web browser), which works well for either POP or
IMAP. We do not recommend Eudora from Qualcomm, as it is both "quirky"
and no longer supported by Qualcomm (migrated to an open source project,
but that is still vaporware) as of October
2006. Whatever software you use, you should ensure that it continues
to be supported and updated to conform to evolving Internet standards and
deal with new security threats.
How do I view a message's full SMTP headers?
If you are unsure of how to get the Full Header information in your email
messages, check the "Help" section of your email client. For your convenience,
here are instructions for viewing the Full Header information of an email
message in several of the most common email clients:
Microsoft Outlook Express:
- Open the unwanted message in your inbox.
- Go to the "File" menu, then click on "Properties".
- Go to the "Details" tab. The header information will be in the "Details" window.
Microsoft Outlook:
- Open the unwanted message in your inbox.
- Click on "View".
- Go to "Options". The header information will be in the "Internet Headers" window.
Gmail:
- Click the unwanted message to view it.
- Click on the down arrow at the upper right corner of the message (next to "Reply").
- Select "Show original".
Thunderbird:
- Open the unwanted message in your inbox.
- Go to the "View" menu, click on "Headers", and select the "All" option.
AOL:
- Log into your AOL account.
- Open the unwanted message in your inbox.
- At the very end of the message, the full header information will be displayed below the line labeled "Headers".
Eudora:
- Open the unwanted message in your inbox.
- Click the "Blah Blah Blah" button in the upper left-hand corner of the message window.
Hotmail:
- Log into your Hotmail account.
- Click on "Options" at top of screen.
- Then click "Preferences (at far right, under "Additional Options").
- Go to "Message Headers" under "Other Hotmail Options".
- Click on the "Full" button, then scroll down and click "okay". All messages will now display full header information directly below the "basic" header information (right below the date).
Billing and Payments
When and how will we be billed?
On the first of every month, your billing contact will receive an email
invoice detailing your services and fees for the preceding month. All new
services carry a setup fee of twice the basic monthly rate, which appears
on the initial bill along with fees pro-rated from the signup date. You
do not need to pay anything up-front; simply wait for the invoice on the
first of the month after you sign up.
We bill by email only, no dead-tree mail, which makes it extra
important that we have valid contact addresses for you, that our emails to
you are not blocked or filtered, and that you keep us updated with any
email address changes (see below).
How do we pay for Electric Embers service?
We accept payments by any credit card, debit card or checking account
through PayPal, or else by check for
advance payments of at least 6 months, for which you receive a 10%
discount. Details appear on your invoice, which also contains links to
make online payments.
How can we update contact information?
We track an administrative and a billing contact for your account, and
appreciate your help in keeping contact information up to date. Your
contacts are listed in the monthly email that contains your invoice. To
update or correct the information listed there, the current contact should
email billing@electricembers.net
with a new name, email address, and phone number.
Where do I login to see my past invoices
and billing activity?
Each monthly billing email contains a link to that month's invoice online,
but other than that, there is currently no online billing system at EE for
you to login to. If you lose the billing email with the invoice link and
need to access it, we will be happy to re-send it to you. If you need to
access your billing and payment history with EE, eg. for an audit, please
let us know what range of months you need to access and we will send you
a list of links to each month's invoice.
Can payments be automated?
Sorry, we can't process automated monthly payments at this time. You can
pay each month using the links in your invoice, or send an advance payment
to avoid having to think about it each month.
Best Practices
Selecting strong passwords
Your EE services are provided by peer-reviewed open source software and
protected by cryptographically secure encryption technologies and tight
security policies. However, all the careful programming, system
administration, and advanced mathematics in the world are useless if you
pick a weak password. Maintaining a strong password is how you protect
your data and prevent abuse of your account.
Your password is your responsibility, and you can set it to whatever
you want. Although it's important to be able to remember your password,
it's even more important to pick something that only you can know.
Personal information like special dates or names can be easily guessed.
Simple words can be guessed or discovered in brute force dictionary
attacks. Don't use the same password for all of your online accounts.
A good password is over 6 characters long and includes both capital and
lowercase letters, and some non-alpha characters like numbers or
punctuation.
Using secure connections (TLS/SSL) for email
We highly recommend the use of encrypted/secure connections for all server
communications -- especially if you use a wireless network connection
(most especially public ones) or any computers that are not your
own or your organization's -- as this will ensure that no one can eavesdrop
on your private email traffic. SSL can be used to encrypt email
communications just as it is used to secure Web sites, and TLS is a minor
enhancement that allows the client software to initiate a secure
connection on the same network port used for insecure connections, which
simplifies configuration on both sides.
Note that SSL/TLS encrypts the traffic between the email client and
server, but this is not the same thing as sending encrypted email
messages to your recipients, which would prevent anyone else accessing the
delivered message from being able to read it. This practice is called
Secure MIME or S/MIME, and it requires the use of message encryption
software such as GPG with your email
client. If you are sending mail via the Webmail interface of our NPOMail
service, we have installed a GPG plugin that you can configure via the
Options page. If you are using any other service or client software,
refer to your software's documentation or the GPG docs for information on
setting up encrypted email.
POP versus IMAP
The two Internet standards for communications between email client
software and email servers are POP (Post Office Protocol) and
IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), and both are supported by
EE. POP is the oldest and simplest of the two standards, and it
works like its namesake, a post office: your email software sends out a
request to the server (ie. goes to the post office), asks if any mail has
come in, and retrieves it for you to open and read, at which point the
mail is removed from the server. (There is an option in all POP clients
to leave a copy of messages on the server even after they're retrieved,
but the default is to remove them.) The POP client thus has very limited
interaction with the server, and all your saved messages (and Sent
messages and Trash and any other folders) exist only on your computer, not
on the server -- the client and server are pretty much independent worlds,
so you don't see any of your locally stored data when connecting from,
say, Webmail.
IMAP on the other hand essentially gives you a live view of
everything that's stored on the server, via a connection that stays open
as long as you're logged in. All the IMAP mail folders you see in your
mail client actually exist on the server (though you can also create local
folders for special purposes), including your Sent messages, your Trash,
etc., and IMAP downloads each message as you read it and doesn't store it
locally unless it caches data, which you can control in your client
settings. This scheme saves disk space on your own computer, preserves
your data in the event of your computer crashing, and most importantly
allows you to access all the same data from anywhere via Webmail or
another IMAP client.
So if IMAP is so much better, why does anyone still use POP, and why
would you? First, IMAP does create a different workflow and data flow that
is not right for situations in which you want all your data stored
locally on your computer, or where you don't want to wait for each message
to load as you click on it to read it, which is IMAP's primary mode of
operation (and local caching or "work offline" mode, if available, can be messy).
It is also a more complex protocol that puts more load on the server and
network connections and that opens up more opportunities for problems and
software bugs. For more details you can read the Wikipedia article on IMAP.
Using Webmail with POP or IMAP
There is one major issue to keep in mind when reading your mail through
Webmail and that is the question of "What happens to the messages I've
already read?". When you read messages through the Web, they will remain
on the server and they will download as usual the next time you connect
with your email program (Outlook, Mac Mail, etc.), as long as you do not
manually delete them. (If you do delete messages through the Webmail
page, by default they will just be moved to a mailbox called
Trash on the server, so you can recover them there.)
However, if your email program is using the POP protocol, messages that
you have read in your email program will not be accessible through
the Web anymore, because they have been downloaded to your computer and
removed from the server. The alternative IMAP protocol uses a different
model in which all messages remain on the server and the email client has
full access to all the folders in your account, rather than just the
Inbox. So if you switch your email program to using IMAP, its view of
your email and Webmail's view will always perfectly match.
If you want to keep using POP, you can change its default behavior to
leave a copy of every message you receive on the server even after
you've downloaded it in your client software, so you can read it later
through the Web. And if you don't need your mail stored permanently on
the server, you should also use the option that removes it automatically
after a limited time -- say 1-2 weeks. This is easy to configure in your
email software.
And if your next question is: "How about all the messages I've
sent from the office? How do I see those in Webmail?" (or vice
versa). If you're using POP, you don't -- the Sent folder on your
computer is completely separate from the Sent folder in Webmail. If
you're using IMAP, the Sent folders will always remain in perfect sync.
Emailing large files or multiple recipients
While people generally think of email as a good way, or the only way, to
exchange files of any type and size, it is in fact designed only for very
small messages, and large ones can cause problems at many points in the
process. Similarly, email can be used to communicate directly with large
numbers of recipients (To:, Cc:, or Bcc: lists), but problems arise past
a certain point. There are alternative solutions that we highly recommend
for sending large files, sending to large numbers of recipients, and most
of all for doing both at the same time.
Here are some guidelines for the rough limits you should always observe:
- Maximum message size direct to one recipient: 10MB
- Maximum message size (direct or listserv) to many recipients: 1MB
- Maximum number of direct recipients for a small message: 100
- Maximum number of recipients (direct or listserv) for a large message: 10
If you're beyond the suggested limits, use these alternatives:
Sending large files
Email was designed for exchanging tiny text-only messages (1KB - 10KB).
It's since been extended to accomodate HTML messages and attachments, and
it remains a good way to exchange small files (10KB - 100KB) and an okay
way to send medium-sized files (100KB - 1MB). But transmitting email
involves sending messages through many servers, which makes email a very
inefficient way to distribute large files (over 1MB). While it may be
okay in rare situations to email a 1MB - 10MB file to a single person who
you know is interested in receiving it, it's never appropriate to attach a
file larger than 10MB to an email message. Keep in mind that sending to a
large listserv is essentially the same as sending to a large number of
recipients, so you should never attach more than 1MB, and preferably much
less.
Although we're inevitably creating and using larger and larger files as
computers get faster and hard drives bigger, the email protocols are still
the same ones that were designed for tiny files. So as we send larger and
larger emails, ISPs are increasingly limiting the size of messages that
can be sent or received. You may not be able to send large files, and if
you can, your recipients may not be able to receive them.
Luckily, there are many other more efficient ways of sending large
files. If you're sending them within an office, you can use local area
network file sharing technologies. If you're sending them to someone out
on the Internet, you can upload the file to your website, send an email
with the URL, and have the recipient download it right from their web
browser. The email will be received extremely quickly, and if the
recipient chooses to download the file, they'll receive it more quickly,
more efficiently, and with no ISP-imposed obstacles.
If you can't use your website in this way, you might choose a free
file-hosting service like sendspace. Or if you distribute many
files to the same recipients over and over, you might all be able to use a
peer-to-peer file sharing service like Pando.
As a rule of thumb, EE recommends drawing the line for email
attachments at about 1MB. If your file is larger than this, use your
website or a file sharing service instead, and for truly large files
you may have to burn a CD and mail it.
Sending to large numbers of recipients
You can send to large numbers of recipients using your normal email program,
but as you may know, many email services restrict the number of recipients
you can have on an outgoing message, and there are good reasons for this.
The most obvious is the simple load on the outgoing mail server, which is
probably not designed or optimized to handle hundreds of deliveries
simultaneously or in quick succession.
More to the point, sending to more than
a handful of recipients is almost certainly an indication of one-way
announcements sent by one person to a list they've built over time.
Inevitably,
some of the people on the list will eventually change addresses, resulting
in a flurry of bounce messages, or will decide they no longer want to receive
the mailings, or that they never wanted to receive them in the first
place. In a surprising number of those cases, rather than simply try to
contact the sender for removal, they will report the message as spam to their
ISP, which will eventually result in a block on all of the sender's mail. It
is always harder to get off a blocklist than it is to simply avoid getting on
one in the first place.
The solution is to use a mass mailing service, the simplest form of which
is a traditional list server (aka listserver, listserve, or listserv). You
can populate a listserve with email addresses yourself, but one of its main
benefits is in allowing people to subscribe and unsubscribe themselves using
automated tools that don't require your intervention at all. Most importantly,
the listserver is designed to deliver to many hundreds or thousands of
subscribers as efficiently as possible, and its maintainers take special care
to preserve its good standing with other ISPs to which it makes deliveries.
Our NPOGroups service fills this function, and we encourage you to use it
for large mailings (and also for multi-way discussion groups).
Note that using a listserve still doesn't eliminate the problems with sending
large files to large numbers of recipients. If you need to do that, see the
recommendations above for uploading your file to a
local server, your Web site, or a filesharing service and then simply emailing
the list a link to that URL. This is a much more efficient way to distribute
large chunks of data.
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Electric Embers Cooperative, Inc. is a member of
NTEN and NoBAWC
with many other allies
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