Tucker Communications - Tucker News
Tucker News (Total Nr articles 85)

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WebMail Down
Date: 9/7/2007
Sending mail through the webmail service is currently down. We are waiting back from Vircom about this and should have it fixed shortly. Thank you for you patience

On the plus side, spam has decreased 90%!!!
Please let us know about your false positives and look forward to a Web interface for registering junk mail.

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Mail Upgrade
Date: 8/31/2007
Dear Valued Customers, The Mail server will be undergoing major upgrades and will be down on Sunday night (09/02/07). These upgrades will vastly reduce incoming spam and viruses. Please notify us of any unexpected results after Labor Day weekend. Thank you.

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Suspicious E-mail
Date: 11/28/2005
Dear Valued Tucker Communications Customers,
It has come to our attention that there may have been e-mails sent out
impersonating us. If you have received any suspicious e-mails from
webmaster@tucker-usa.com it is safe to delete them. Make sure your
anti-virus programs are active and up to date. Also make sure you
have recently run some type of anti-spyware software such as
Ad-Aware or Spy-Bot Search and Destroy. If you have nay questions
regarding suspicious e-mail from us or if you think you may have
become infected please call our support staff at 231-796-2548.

Thank you,
The Webmaster

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Mail Server Maintenance
Date: 11/16/2005
Attention Valued Tucker Communications Customers;

Our mail server will be undergoing some maintenance on Thursday November
17th from 10:30 am till 2:00pm. The server may be inaccessible at times.
So please be patient while we improve our server to provide you with better services.

Thank you,

The Webmaster

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Warning When Placing A Classified Ad
Date: 3/18/2005

Warning When Placing A Classified Ad

If you place an ad, you will probably receive an E-mail or PHONE CALL from someone (usually from out of the United States) who claims to be interested in the item(s) you are trying to sell. They will offer to send you a money order or check for more money than that item you are trying to sell. They will tell you to send them a money order for the balance. BEWARE! This is a scam! The original check they will send you will not be good and by the time it clears and you find out, you may have already sent them the 'change' in a money order. Do not fall for this scam! Remember! If the offer sounds too good - it probably is!

There are quite a few of these 'scammers' out there. Some of our visitors have reported receiving telephone calls and many of our visitors have forwarded the E-mails they have received. In each case, though - the 'interested party' claims to be out of the country. Why would anyone pay to have an item shipped when the shipping would cost way more than the item is probably worth? Please use common sense when trying to sell your item! Don't fall for a scam! And don't ever, ever make a deal with someone who wants you to send them 'change' or the 'difference' in a money order. If it sounds too good to be true - it is!

We suggest just deleting any mail that sounds 'fishy.' However, if you feel the need to 'do something' you could report the E-mail to the scammer's ISP (Internet Service Provider.) For example, if the mail is from 'scammer at yahoo.com,' report the mail to Yahoo. Most ISP's have a policy forbidding junk mail and scam attempts. If you report the mail (send it with the message headers) - then that person will be in violation of his/her terms of agreement and will have their E-mail account closed.


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Outlook Express E-mail Troubles
Date: 12/14/2004
Dear Valued Tucker Communications Customers,
We are committed to providing you with the best possible internet and e-mail experience possible, and our latest effort to uphold that commitment includes this notice.
It has come to our attention that many of you have been experiencing a problem while downloading e-mail with Outlook Express. If you have been getting the message “Your server has unexpectedly terminated the connection . . .' while receiving e-mail, one of the following could be the cause.
  1. The most recent and most common cause of this error is the “Incoming Mail Scanner” of Norton Antivirus. Click on this link for more information. http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/nav.nsf/docid/2001060516275506
  2. Malformed or Corrupted E-mail
    • To fix this issue, go to www.tucker-usa.com, log in to your web mail account by using your e-mail address as your username and your password.
    • Then Look for any e-mails that have uncommon characters in the subject field or e-mails that are missing either the date or time information. On some rare occasions the date will be there, but will be out of order, for example it might have a date from a year in the future or in the past. If it is out of order then delete it.
If you have Norton Antivirus and you are not experiencing these problems, then please disregard this notice.

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Mail Server Upgrade
Date: 12/13/2004
Dear Valued Tucker Communications Customers,

On Wednesday Dec15th 2004, starting at 10:00pm, we will be performing some upgrades on our mail server software. This upgrade will require minimal downtime and should last for no longer than a period of 30 minutes. The upgrade will improve the security, and functionality of our e-mail system. Some of the security enhancements include;
  • Fraud and phishing protection with SPF authentication layer
  • Customizable whitelists, blacklists and security settings to give users more control over email behavior
  • UltraSecure™ Mailbox feature for customers who want to get email exclusively from whitelisted senders
  • Improved Spam blocking
Thank you and Happy Holidays from the staff at Tucker Communications.

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ColdFusion MX upgrade
Date: 10/21/2004
Attention Valued Customers, We will be upgrading our ColdFusion Server from ColdFusion MX to ColdFusion MX 6.1. Some of the new features included in ColdFusion MX 6.1 are;

Performance: Runtime performance has been enhanced, thus delivering radically improved application performance and scalability over ColdFusion MX, ColdFusion 5, and ColdFusion 4.5. Significant changes have also been made to the CFML compiler, reducing initial template compilation time by an order of magnitude.

CFMAIL:* Enhancements to the cfmail tag deliver a new industrial-strength, high-performance mail handler, which can support more than 1,000,000 e-mail messages per hour. It features new multithreading, connection pooling, server failover, spool-to-memory, support for multipart mail messages (HTML and plain text) with the new cfmailpart tag, support for SMTP authentication, and improved character set encoding.

CFHTTP: Enhancements include support for the full set of HTTP 1.1 operations (GET, POST, HEAD, PUT, DELETE, TRACE, OPTIONS), full control over the content of any HTTP request (headers and body), and timeout and proxy support.

CFPOP: The cfpop tag now supports retrieval of both text/plain and text/html message parts.

Web services: Powerful new web services invocation functionality includes the ability to specify timeouts and proxy settings, and to ColdFusion components (CFCs): Fixes and improvements to CFCs address a number of outstanding issues, improve the use of scopes, and allow access to overridden methods with the Super keyword.

COM: ColdFusion MX 6.1 further improves the performance and interoperability of cfobject tag and CreateObject function calls to COM objects compared to ColdFusion MX Updater 3. For details, see COM Fixes and Enhancements.

Unicode in Access: ColdFusion MX 6.1 includes a Microsoft Access driver with Unicode support.

Migration: ColdFusion MX 6.1 includes enhanced versions of the Administrator Migration Wizard and Code Compatibility Analyzer. Also, ColdFusion 5 compatibility has been enhanced.

Updates to integrated products ColdFusion MX 6.1 includes the following updates to integrated products: Latest version of Flash Remoting (Updater 1) Latest version of JRun 4 (Updater 2) Updated CFCHART engine Axis 1.1 Web Services engine Updated versions of the DataDirect JDBC drivers (3.2 SP1) Updates to DataDirect SequeLink 5.3 ODBC Agent, ODBC Server, and JDBC driver J-Integra 1.5.3 The Sun 1.4.2 JVM

CFLOGIN: The cflogin tag can be tied to sessions instead of cookies (default), and supports NTLM/Digest security.

Character sets: ColdFusion MX 6.1 improves the Chinese-Japanese-Korean customer experience by removing the need to explicitly declare charsets/character encodings in most situations.

General bug fixes: In addition to the enhancements listed previously, ColdFusion MX 6.1 also fixes more than 400 bugs beyond those addressed in Updater 3. The Resolved Issues list provides details on more than 200 of these fixed bugs.

For More Information on the improvments of ColdFusion MX 6.1 go to: http://www.macromedia.com/support/coldfusion/releasenotes/mx/mx61_release_notes.html


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Spyware Information
Date: 10/4/2004

What are parasites?

‘Parasite’ is a shorthand term for “unsolicited commercial software” — that is, a program that gets installed on your computer which you never asked for, and which does something you probably don’t want it to, for someone else’s profit.

The parasite problem has grown enormously recently, and many millions of computers are affected. Unsolicited commercial software can typically:

  • plague you with unwanted advertising (‘adware’);
  • watch everything you do on-line and send information back to marketing companies (‘spyware’);
  • add advertising links to web pages, for which the author does not get paid, and redirect the payments from affiliate-fee schemes to the makers of the software (such software is sometimes called ‘scumware’);
  • set browser home page and search settings to point to the makers’ sites (generally loaded with advertising), and prevent you changing it back (‘homepage hijackers’);
  • make your modem (analogue or ISDN) call premium-rate phone numbers (‘diallers’);
  • leave security holes allowing the makers of the software — or, in particularly bad cases, anyone at all — to download and run software on your machine;
  • degrade system performance and cause errors thanks to being badly-written;
  • provide no uninstall feature, and put its code in unexpected and hidden places to make it difficult to remove.

All the parasites I currently know about are only compatible with Windows, and some only affect the Internet Explorer browser.

Where do they come from?

There are three major ways unsolicited commercial software can make its way on to your machine:

  • Some freeware programs are ‘bundled’ with parasites, which are installed at the same time. The P2P file-sharing programs are notorious for this; in particular, iMesh and Grokster come with countless unwanted add-ons.

    Often if you are careful to read the small print when you install the software it will warn you about this, and it is sometimes possible to opt out. So always skim the licence agreement when you install and don’t just click Next-Next-Next... but you still can’t be sure they’ll tell you.

  • Many parasites load using Internet Explorer’s ActiveX installation option. When a web page includes a link to an ActiveX program, a window will appear asking the user wishes to execute it. If ‘Yes’ is clicked (or if IE security settings are set lower than normal so that it never even asks*), the software is allowed to run and can do anything at all it likes on our computer, including installing parasites.

    For this reason, you should never click ‘Yes’ to a “Do you wish to download and install...” prompt unless you are 100% sure you trust the publisher of the software, which might not be the publisher of the web site you are viewed — read the dialogue box very carefully.

    Sometimes sites (or pop-up ads) try to fool you into clicking ‘Yes’ by stating that the software is necessary to view the site, or opening endless error windows if you click ‘No’, or claiming that the digital certificate on the code means it is safe. It means no such thing. ‘Microsoft Authenticode’, signed by companies like Verisign, means only that the company that wrote the software is the same as the company whose name appears on the download prompt — nothing more.

  • Some of the really sleazy parasites, particularly homepage-hijackers and diallers, execute by exploiting security holes in Internet Explorer, ways of getting code to run that are not supposed to be possible, but are due to mistakes in the browser code.

    You can do your best to guard against this by ensuring you have the latest updates and patches from Microsoft. Still, there are usually a handful of security holes that have not yet been corrected, so you can never be 100% sure you are safe.

    One way of reducing your risk of exploitation is to go to Tools->Internet Options->Security and set the security level for the Internet Zone to ‘High’. (If no slider is visible, click ‘Default level to make it appear first.) Then set the security level for the Trusted Zone to ‘Medium’ and add the sites you use and trust to this zone; you may need to do this quite often as many badly-designed sites just won’t work in high-security mode.

An alternative solution for the last two problems is just to use a different web browser for everyday browsing, and Internet Explorer only for sites you trust that stubbornly refuse to work with other browsers.

Why doesn’t my anti-virus software detect this?

Technically, most unsolicited commercial software isn’t viral: it doesn’t spread from computer to computer, it just installs and runs on one system.

That doesn’t mean it’s not harmful, but anti-virus software does not attempt to detect all software that could be harmful. Whether it should is a tricky argument that ends up a question of where you draw the line.

Actually some anti-virus programs do detect some of the parasites outlined on these pages, but not nearly all, and not all versions of them. Parasites that install using IE security holes are more likely to be targeted by the anti-virus software vendors, but the selection of targets seems for the most part to be pretty arbitrary.

For this reason there are now a number of anti-parasite packages around that work as a complement to anti-virus software.

For more information about Spyware and Parasites go to http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/

Courtesy of http://www.doxdesk.com/


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High Speed DSL Starting at $39.95!
Date: 8/6/2004
We now offer high speed DSL starting at $39.95 a month for Residential Customers. That includes 5 e-mail accounts and free personal web space!

For our Business Customers we offer DSL at $49.95 a month. And, for $10.00 more, our basic web hosting package. Thats a $5.00 a month savings!

Call now! 796-2548
Click here for DSL Rate Information! 
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