First of all, Happy New Year! We hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable holiday season. Wow, what an exciting year 2003 was for Blue Virtual! It's hard to believe it's been only eight months since Blue Virtual was created. We have been through plenty of up's and a couple of downs, but nothing has derailed us from our goal of providing exceptional service and support for an extremely affordable price. It could easily be called a success, but we aren't finished yet. We plan to build on this success and forge ahead into not only 2004, but many years beyond.

     Secondly, we would like to point out a feature we feel isn't being used to its full potential. We have client forums located at www.BlueVirtual.com/forum/ for our clients to express their issues, concerns, and most importantly, get information from us. We use the forums to notify customers of new features, server upgrades, outages, and other important notifications. A member of the Blue Virtual staff checks the forum almost every minute of the day. Not to mention the 200+ clients who help each other with issues from web hosting to personal life. It's a great community of people and if you don't already use it at least once a day, you should start. Now onto the news...

SpamAssassin Released - We recently released the SpamAssassin Spam filtering software. We allow you to utilize SpamAssassin on each individual email account, allowing you total and complete flexibility. We have yet to see another host allow this much control. To use it, simply create a "Spam Profile" under "Mail Management" in your control panel and attach that profile to any and all pop accounts you wish to filter with those settings. Any email coming to that address is then filtered through SpamAssassin and a score is earned. Depending on your settings, you can have SpamAssassin do a number of things with that email. It's that simple. More information is available in the forums.

Majordomo Released - Majordomo Mailing List Software with the MajorCool Web Interface was released two weeks ago. Majordomo is similar to Mailman which is already offered. Majordomo can be found in your control panel, under "Mail Management". Mailman will continue to be offered.

IMP Webmail Released - IMP Webmail is a new addition to our Webmail clients. IMP is similar to OpenWebMail which we currently offer, but it's much more efficient. If you are on the go and need to check your email then just go to "http://www.yourdomain.com/impwebmail/" or http://webmail.mynethost.com/impwebmail/.

Mailing-list Server Implemented - Brown.mynethost.com is now the new mailing-list only server. No more waiting for your email to come through because someone sent a 10,000 member mailing-list that is tying up the server. Brown also serves as a redundant mail server in the event that Green is unavailable. All mail will then be transferred to Brown and automatically sent to Green whenever Green becomes unavailable.

Other Notables - All of the above features are available to retail and resold accounts as of today. Keep in mind, to allow your clients to use these features, they must be activated in the packages inside your reseller area.

We have combined payment methods that are the same. Previously, you may have had duplicate payment methods in your control panel, but we have now combined any identical payment methods so you will no longer have duplicates.

Billing System Audit - As many of you know, we have migrated from a third party billing solution, to our own custom built solution. During that transition, some inconsistencies were created. We have just completed our first audit of the accounts in our system. We found several accounts that were never inserted into our billing system, therefore no invoices were created, and no payment was made. We have since corrected this and all invoices prior and current have been generated. These invoices will have a payment pending status in your invoice manager within your control panel.

We understand this may cause problems for some of our clients and want to give you time to secure the funds for the payments. We are allowing all clients 30 days to have all past due invoices paid. After this time, we will begin disabling accounts. If you need to make different payment arrangements, please contact us by submitting a "Contact Ticket" via your control panel. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Instant Payment Module Released - To aide our clients in correcting billing issues, we have released an instant payment module. It will process your payment immediately and give you a response. This feature is accessible through your control panel under "Invoice Manager".

Apache/PHP Upgrade - On January 21st, 2004 at 12:01 AM CDT we are planning an upgrade of Apache on all systems. This upgrade will include Apache 1.3.29 and PHP 4.3.4. We expect minimal service interruption for http traffic, with the instance being less than 5 minutes per server.

Resold Order Form Upgraded - The order form to order resold accounts has been upgraded to allow you to select one of your current payment methods to be used for the billing of the account. You no longer need to input all of your credit card data if we already have it on file. This makes ordering a resold account much easier, so everyone try it and order some resold accounts!

Geographic Redundant Mail - Since we still have previous colocation space that we used to house our equipment in, we have devised a plan to utilize it. We have installed redundant DNS and mail servers at that location. In the event of a network outage, email would be captured at the secondary location and then sent to the primary location when it's available again. We will begin adding an additional MX record to all accounts that use our current mail servers in the coming weeks. The next article should describe what will be required for you to utilize these redundant servers.

Geographic Redundant DNS - In order for your domain name to utilize the new geographic redundant nameserver, you will need to modify your domain name record with your registrar and add a DNS server to your record. Please add either ns3.bluevirtual.com (64.207.196.30) or ns3.mynethost.com (64.207.196.32) to your domain name record.

suPHP - We have discovered a function that could possibly make PHP much more secure to use on our systems. it will run all PHP as the user, instead of as "nobody". We are testing to see what functions (if any) this module doesn't work well with. Once we test it, we plan to implement it on one of the web servers and have clients test it.

MySQL version 4.0.17 - Several requests have been made for MySQL to be upgraded. We are looking at the newest stable release.

Apache/PHP Upgrade - On January 21st, 2004 at 12:01 AM CDT we are planning an upgrade of Apache on all systems. This upgrade will include Apache 1.3.29 and PHP 4.3.4. We expect minimal service interruption for http traffic, with the instance being less than 5 minutes per server.

Possible OS Upgrade for Web Servers - Red Hat has recently discontinued support and updates for Red Hat 7.3 which we currently utilize on all of our servers. We are looking into alternatives that include FreeBSD, Red Hat Enterprise, and Fedora.

Phasing Out OpenWebMail - We plan to phase out OWM in the near future. This product has some issues that simply can't be resolved. The IMP client is far more efficient and works very well. We will produce a firm date on when this product will end life and give clients some time to clear their mail out from OWM.

phpBB Upgrade - We will be upgrading phpBB to version of 2.0.6c. It has greater security and some new features.

     This concludes our first official newsletter. We want to thank all of you for continuing to be wonderful people to work with. You all make this job extremely rewarding. Thank you.

Happy surfing,

The Entire Blue Virtual Staff