Happy Thanksgiving Holiday
November 23, 2004 - The Pacific Online Office will be closing early at 6:00pm the day before Thanksgiving, Wednesday 11/24/04, and will be closed on Thanksgiving Day, Thursday 11/25/04.

Voice over IP Service Added
October 1, 2004 VoiceEclipse is a comprehensive service brought to you by Pacific Online, that allows you to place and receive phone calls using your broadband (high speed) internet connection. You may keep your existing telephone number and broadband Internet connection and avoid the rising costs of traditional phone service - simply use the "plug & go" VoiceEclipse phone adapter which is sent to you upon order of this service. For more information on this new and exciting service please visit: http://www.pon.net/service/voiceeclipse/index.htm 

Change in Year Pre-payment price
September 13, 2004 Yearly pre payments on monthly services with Pacific Online are now discounted 5%.. 

Happy Labor Day
September 1, 2004 Pacific Online will be closed Monday September 6th for Labor Day. Have a safe and happy holiday.

National Coverage
July 13, 2004 Pacific Online is excited to announce we now offer local dialup coverage in 49 out of the 50 US states. For a list of all dialup locations please visit: www.pon.net/national 

Happy 4th of July
July 2, 2004 Have a safe and great 4th of July. Pacific Online will close at 1:30pm on the Federal Holiday, Monday July 5th. 

Spam
June 30, 2004 A very elusive bug that over the last 10 days has resulted in an increase in Spam has been found. Steps are being taken to fix this as soon as possible so that less Spam comes through to mailboxes.
Update: This issue with our spam filtering was resolved in early July.

Network Latency
June 29, 2004 For several hours this afternoon/evening there was latency in the network that may have caused problems checking email and visiting select websites. The offending server causing these problems was isolated and removed from the network.

Network Maintenance
June 22, 2004 During approximately the hour of 6:30am and 7:30am on Wednesday June 23, 2004 there will be intermittent periods where you will not be able to connect to the Internet. This time will be used for network maintenance issues.
 
New Worms affecting Microsoft Windows 2000/2003/XP
May 2, 2004 (Updated May 3) - W32.Sasser.worm, and variants W32.Sasser.Worm.B, attempt to exploit a vulnerability described in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS04-011 and spread by scanning random IP addresses for vulnerable systems. These worms are *not* transmitted by email. When connecting to the Internet, you may see errors referring to:

  -- "LSA Shell (Export Version) has encountered a problem... Please tell Microsoft about this problem."
  -- "This system is shutting down... This shutdown was initiated by NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM". 

If your Windows computer is infected, you should update your anti-virus software with the latest virus definitions and run a full system scan in order to detect and clean the worm. You should also install the Microsoft update for this exploit available from the Microsoft Security Bulletin MS04-011 web page: 
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS04-011.mspx

More information about the worms can be found at the web page of your anti-virus software, or visit:

W32.Sasser.worm.b - Symantec.com / Norton.com (includes Removal tool)
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/
w32.sasser.b.worm.html

W32.Sasser.worm.b - Mcafee.com
http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=description&virus_k=125008

Please update your anti-virus software as often as possible. If your computer is not setup to automatically check with Microsoft for Windows Updates, please be sure to check http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com for critical updates on an regular basis. 

Web Server Maintenance
April 14, 2004 - One of our primary web servers will be taken offline for up to an hour this evening beginning around 10pm. This will not affect email or dialup service.

Service Interruption
March 25, 2004 - There is currently a service interruption in which dialup users will experience slow load times or time outs while viewing web pages. Users may get "Page unavailable" errors when viewing websites and certain website content may load slowly. Technicians are currently working on resolving this issue as soon as possible. 11:00am **Service is now restored**

Fast Busy Signals
March 8, 2004 - You may experience fast busy signals tonight which will usually show up as an error message 676. Emergency maintenance is currently underway and Engineers are working at the moment to correct this problem as soon as possible.

Virus Alert Imitating PON.net 
March 3, 2004 - A virus containing a .zip attachment imitating an email from pon.net is currently circulating - its usually sent from a staff@pon.net which is an email address that does not exist. If you receive one of these emails simply delete it and do not open it. We will never send an attachment in regards to keeping your account open, nor will we ever request credit card information via email. If you are ever unsure if an email address from us is legitimate, you should call us for verification. The email virus currently circulating usually contains the following text:

"Dear user, the management of Pon.net mailing system wants to let you know that, Your e-mail account has been temporary disabled because of unauthorized access.

For details see the attached file. For security purposes the attached file is password protected. Password is
"#####". Best wishes, The Pon.net team http://www.pon.net"

Emergency Maintenance 
February 26 2004 8:35am - Our Mail server has been taken offline to replace failing hardware.  Estimated downing is 30 - 40 minutes.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and unexpected downtime.  

All incoming mail is being spooled on our relay server(s) and will be delivered once the main mail server comes back online.

Email Update
February 20th 2004 - 12:25pm - We have discovered an issue with our anti spam engine and how it's writing to the sql database.  

This error under certain circumstances was causing the sql server to no longer accept new entries and would cause mail delays until we manually corrected the issue.  We have contacted the software provider our of mail server, and have been working with their R&D department to find a solution.  

Until a viable solution is put in place, all email suspected of being spam sent to @pon.net addresses will have the subject modified to include *** Likely Spam *** Update: 10:00pm - Spam is once again being quarantined.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Phishing Scams
Feb 17,  2004 - In an effort to keep you updated on recent scams that are occurring, we are posting this alert. 

You may have heard of the term "phishing," as it has been in the news recently. "Phishing" is a way that hackers or scammers attempt to steal consumer's identity. According to the Chairman of the FTC Timothy J. Muris, "Phishing is a two time scam...Phishers first steal a company's identity and then use it to victimize consumers by stealing their credit identities..."

You may have received an e-mail that has been used in a Phishing scam, and some of you may have not. Phishers will send out bulk e-mails posing as a legitimate company, some of the companies targeted have been eBay, PayPal, AOL, the FBI, VISA, and many banks among others. These e-mails will often ask the consumer to visit a website that they have set up, and will ask for personal information. Once the consumer enters their personal information, the Phishers are free to begin using it themselves, or sell it out to other individuals who want to use it. 

Many of the company's targeted by these Phishers are aware of this and encourage consumers to forward any suspicious e-mail received. They are generally very quick to respond to the consumer and let them know if indeed this was a legitimate e-mail or not.

We have included some websites that you may want to visit to learn more about phishing, some of them will go into detail about what the e-mails contain and information that they ask for. There is also an area available in the FBI's website to log these e-mails. 

• www.michigan.gov/ag/0,1607,7-164--81088--,00.html 
• www.FBI.gov 
• www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/phishingalrt.htm 
• www.ftc.gov/opa/2003/07/phishing.htm 
• www.antiphishing.org 

Mail Server Update
Feb 12,  2004 - There is a known network issue that may cause sporadic busy signals and logon difficulty today. This problem is currently being worked on. Thank you for your patience.

Mail Server Update
Feb 10,  2004 - A new mail server was put online this morning at 3am. This machine is much faster than the old mail server and is able to handle the overall load much better. 

Mail Server Update
Feb 2,  2004 (11:00am) - Our new mail program is being upgraded this morning. This may result in not being able to check email temporarily. A note will be posted as soon as this upgrade is complete.

Update (11:20am): - we are continuing to work on this.

Mail Migration Update
Jan 28,  2004 (1:30am) - Pacific Online has migrated emails to our new mail server Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning. On Wednesday January 28th we will point the current webmail (email.pon.net and mx.pon.net) to our new webmail. 

If you have emailed us already regarding migrating your webmail address book - we have all of these emails and will be migrating these during our normal business hours.

If you have questions regarding the new webmail - please contact us via email at support@pon.net

Thanks for your patience during this migration. ~ Pacific Online Support

New virus/worm making the rounds
Jan 26,  2004 - A new virus called W32/MyDoom.A@mm (also known as W32.Novarg.A@mm) was discovered today that is considered a HIGH threat by anti-virus companies. The infected emails may read:

-- Mail transaction failed. Partial message is available.
-- The message contains Unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment.
-- The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has been sent as a binary attachment.

If you receive such an email, do NOT open the attachment. For more info about this virus, click here. As always, please be careful with any email attachments you open and be sure to update your anti-virus software as often as possible.