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Scheduling Email Reports Using SmarterMail

How-to

Jaime MichelNow that we are aware of how to run email reports like disk usage summary, I am going to show you how to schedule these reports to be sent to you via email.

  • First log into your Smartermail web interface using any email account with administrator privileges.
  • Then click on the Reports button on the left side bar.
  • From here we will be creating a Custom Report, so expand the Custom Reports folder and click on Manage Custom Reports link.
  • Click the New button at the top of the interface and you should get a screen similar to the following:
  • Enter a Name for the Custom Report and set a Default Date Range.
For this example we will be using the domain disk usage summary report mentioned earlier in this post but customers have the option of choosing any of the built in reports as part of their Custom Reports.
  • Now that you have named your report and selected a date range click on the Report Items tab at the top of the interface and click on the Add Item button.
  • From the Report Item drop down select the report you would like sent out.

Keep in mind that there are Domain Reports and User Reports so be sure you are selecting the correct report in the drop box. Also email users without administrator privileges can run reports but only User Reports which are reports for their specific email address.

Here is an example of my Custom Report settings:

Now that we have created a Custom Report all we have to do now is schedule the report to be sent out daily.
  • Click on the Scheduled Email Reports link and click on the New button at the top of the page.

  • Now select the report you just created from the Report Item drop-down menu, set the Frequency to Daily(or whatever you’d like).
  • Finally enter the the mail address/es you would like the report sent to in the To and Cc Address(es)  fields and set your Subject, Email Format, and Message fields to your specifications.
  • Click Save  and that’s it!

Your new custom report is now ready to be sent to your email address daily.

Note: If you would like to add more than one recipient to either the TO or Cc field use a comma “,” as a separator for each email address.

How to block bots and spiders with Request Filtering

How-to, Technical

Ray PenalosaIt is often said that if you do not want your information to be stolen, don’t put it on the Internet.  However, the Internet has become an integral part of our lives, and we can’t help but post some kind of web site, blog, or forum.  Even if you don’t tell anyone about your web site, once it is published it will eventually be discovered.

How, you ask?  By robot indexing programs, A.K.A. bots, crawlers and spiders.  These little programs swarm out onto the Internet looking up every web site, caching and logging web site information in their databases.  Often created by search engines to help index pages, they roam the Internet freely crawling all web sites all the time.

Normally this is an acceptable part of the Internet, but some search engines are so aggressive that they can increase bandwidth consumption.  And some bots are malicious, stealing photos from web sites or harvesting email addresses so that they can be spammed.  The simplest way to block these bots is to create a simple robots.txt file that contains instructions to block the bots:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

However, there are a couple of things wrong with this approach.  One is that bots can still hit the site, ignoring your robots.txt file and your wish not to be indexed.

But there is good news. If you are on an IIS 7 server, you have another alternative.  You can use the RequestFiltering Rule that is built-in to IIS 7.  It works on a higher level portion of the web service and it cannot be bypassed by a bot.

The setup is fairly simple, and the easiest and fastest way to initiate your ReqestFiltering Rule is to code it in your application’s web.config file.  The RequestFiltering element goes inside the <system.webServer><security> elements.  If you do not have this in your applications web.config file you should be able to create them.  Once that is created type this schema to setup your RequestFiltering rule.

<requestFiltering>
	<filteringRules>
		<filteringRule name="BlockSearchEngines" scanUrl="false" scanQueryString="false">
			<scanHeaders>
				<clear />
				<add requestHeader="User-Agent" />
			</scanHeaders>
			<appliesTo>
				<clear />
			</appliesTo>
			<denyStrings>
				<clear />
				<add string="YandexBot" />
			</denyStrings>
		</filteringRule>
	</filteringRules>
</requestFiltering>
<authentication>
	<basicAuthentication enabled="true" />
	<anonymousAuthentication enabled="true" />
</authentication>

You can name the filtering rule whatever you’d like and in the “requestHeader” element you will need to make sure you define “User-Agent.”  Within the “add string” element you’ll need to specify the User Agent name.  In this example I set it to YandexBot which blocks a search engine originating from Russia.  You can also block search engines such as Googlebot or Bingbot.

If you want to see if this rule is actually blocking these bots, you will need to download your HTTP raw logs from the server and parse them to look for the headers User-Agent.  If you scroll to the left and find the headers SC-Status (status code) you should see a 404 HTTP response.  In addition the headers will also carry sc-substatus which will be a substatus code to the primary HTTP response code.

Here is a list of potential substatus codes you may see when you impose your RequestFiltering rule.

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Free Webinars from Red Gate

Announcements, Team Foundation Server

Takeshi EtoRed GateJust wanted to let you all know that our partner, Red Gate, will be offering FREE webinars during Jan-Apr 2012 on the topics of Database Version Control and Repeatable Database Deployments.

Check out the times and dates at http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-source-control/webinars

Their SQL Source Control product is pretty cool and Joe blogged about it previously.

Reminder: DiscountASP.NET customers can get a 20% discount on Red Gate’s SQL Source Control. More details can be found your control panel marketplace.

An open letter to the web hosting industry

Hosting Industry, Internet

Michael PhillipsDear hosts,

I know that you are all well aware of SOPA and PIPA. I know that most you want to do something, but you’re not quite sure what that something is.

There are well-meaning efforts afoot in a lot of different places, and our friends at SaveHosting.org have a long term view for creating a political presence for the hosting industry. My hat is off to everyone who has taken time to become informed and make their voices heard.

But what if that’s not enough?

Please take a minute to read this eye-opening article by Emily Badger and Miller-McCune. They explain much more eloquently than I can why we need to put ourselves in front of our representatives in congress. Why form letters and online petitions are not enough. As it turns out, in order to get anyone on Capitol Hill to listen, you have to be in the room with them so they know that you really exist.

So how do we do that? How do we all get together in Washington and get face time with our Senators?

Easy.

You know those big events we have? You’ve been to some of them; HostingCon, PubCon, Parallels Summit, Microsoft MIX, Macworld Expo, TED, SMX, Social Media Summit, BlogWorld & New Media Expo, things like that.

What if we moved all of those conferences to Washington D.C.?

Every one of them.

I know, I know – no one wants to go to Washington for a week and slog around through cold slush or swelter in summer humidity. And no one wants to spend their afternoon talking to their congressional representatives. It doesn’t sound like an appealing way to spend part of that annual travel budget, does it?

But imagine the net effect of hundreds (or thousands) of us, making appointments with our Senators weeks or months in advance, and then descending on the Capitol building on the same day.

Keynote: We All Walk Over To Capitol Hill!

It would be newsworthy, and you know that politicians love to be seen on the news.

And it doesn’t have to – and shouldn’t – stop there. Every time another industry convention is held in D.C. we have another opportunity to twist the Senators arms again. And again and again.

Is that really necessary? Well, consider who is talking to congress every day via lobbyists: The film studios. The television networks. The recording industry. The pharmaceutical companies. Publishers. They are in the Senator’s ears and contributing to their coffers, and we are not. So when it comes to issues like SOPA and PIPA, we may as well not exist.

I know what you’re thinking, “Hey, they vote on SOPA in two weeks! It’s too late to do anything.” While it may be too late for a group of us to converge on Capitol Hill to work against SOPA specifically, PIPA is just as brutal, and it is looming on the horizon. And should worse come to worse and both bills pass, this kind of direct, face to face action becomes even more crucial.

So, my dear friends in the hosting industry, do we dare make these conferences and conventions a little less like vacations and a little more like work? We should. The foundation that all of our businesses are built on is being eroded beneath our feet. Your singular actions are important! Keep it up. But together, we can be much more effective.

The United States Congress is not going to come to us. We have to go to them.

I would respectfully urge anyone who has input into planning any industry gatherings to seriously consider moving them to Washington.

Get the attention of the politicians, get our needs onto the table and into consideration, protect ourselves and our industry. Then we can all go back to Las Vegas and really tie one on in celebration. I’ll buy the first round.

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How to check an email user’s disk usage using SmarterMail’s reporting feature

How-to, Technical, ,

Jaime Michel

  1. First log into your Smartermail web interface using any email account with administrator privileges.
  2. Then click on the Reports button on the left side bar.
  3.  Now expand the Domain Summary Reports folder.
  4.  Expand the Traffic Reports folder.
  5.  Click on Disk Usage

From here you will see a report similar tot he following where each users current Total Disk usage and their Max Disk quota.

No comment

Hosting Industry, Inside DiscountASP.NET, Internet

Michael PhillipsTwitter is a funny thing.

And by funny, of course I mean really weird.

Anyone who has been involved in supporting customers, or dealing with any large group of humans, knows that it’s impossible to please everyone. Think about the last time you tried to get five friends to agree on a place to eat dinner. Now multiply that by 10,000 and you start to get an idea of why it’s usually impossible for us to do something – anything – that everyone will like, appreciate or agree with.

Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus are great, and we’re really enjoying expanding our efforts in those areas, even though it’s not exactly an easy task. In fact, a cynic might say that we’re just opening up more avenues for people to complain. But the thing is, we want to hear complaints.

Yeah, I said it. Bring on the complaints.

Any business that ignores customer complaints is shortsighted, quite possibly crazy and most certainly doomed, and we are none of those things. Every time we deal with a complaint, or solve a service issue, the service improves for everyone.

Do you see a “but” coming? Here it is:

But – there are certain things that we are not going to discuss in public.

Ever. For any reason.

Those things include billing issues, why an account may be suspended, anything involving any personally identifying information, etc. We don’t talk about those things in public because they aren’t the public’s business. We take the privacy of our customers very seriously, and assume that every one of you appreciate that.

That doesn’t always seem to be the case, of course, but we can live with that. If someone on Twitter wants to tell the world that we suck because we refuse to address certain issues that we feel would violate our privacy policies – even if appears that the customer is initiating the conversation – that’s okay. I prefer taking a little flak to discussing a customer’s private business out in the open.

Why? Because a public breach of your private information is a “forever” thing. And we’re going to do all we can to prevent that from happening.

That’s just how we roll, you see.

Having said that, follow us on Twitter! 😉
Become a fan on Facebook.
And join our circles on Google plus.

We look forward to hearing from you.

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What else can you do with Kinect? Music Videos

Miscellaneous, Video

Takeshi EtoHere’s something to start your weekend…

It’s always cool to see what people’s creativity can conjure up. Microsoft saw the popularity of the Kinect and was smart to release an SDK for it.

Here is a music video by Tim & Joe for New Look’s song “Nap on the Bow” which was made using the Kinect camera.


New Look – Nap On The Bow from Tim & Joe on Vimeo.

You can check out what others are doing with Kinect at http://www.kinecthacks.com/

Why you should care about the SOPA and PIPA legislation – Part 2

Hosting Industry, Internet

Michael PhillipsIsmail Hatipoglu asked on Twitter whether the SOPA and PIPA legislation will have any direct impact on our users now or in the future. That’s a good question, and one I neglected to address in yesterday’s article.

If one or both pass, they will unquestionably have a potential negative impact on the hosting experience for everyone.

However – don’t expect anything to change overnight. This is not the kind of thing that will have a direct impact on your sites.

But from the perspective of a host (and this applies to every host in the world, not just DiscountASP.NET), here are some things you can eventually expect to see:

  • Increased new account set up time
  • Periodic “site reviews” to insure that there is no infringing content anywhere
  • Increased fees to support monitoring of sites and to offset litigation costs
  • Periodic “blackouts” of all or part of everyone’s networks, caused by government-sanctioned IP redirection and DNS tampering
  • Decreased tolerance for “borderline” or “questionable infringement” sites

PIPA would require “big brother” oversight of customer content, something we do not undertake now (nor is it something that we want to undertake). But that kind of oversight would be necessary to protect us from legal liability. We – and everyone else – would be forced to watch what our customers are doing a protective measure.

But again, there is no effect now, and if the legislation does manage to pass, I believe we can expect to see a great deal of resistance from some very large companies to enforcement of the vague and punitive aspects of the acts. The day a PIPA complaint removes, say, YouTube from the Internet (it is, after all, a vast repository of copyright infringement), well, I think things will get interesting.

To say the least.

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