What's New at Hover HQ

We will be releasing the next version of our Hover Help site this Friday, Sept. 4th, with the system work being done Thursday evening.

Over the last year we have been using some great tools to get you the answers to your questions. This version of Hover Help pulls these tools together so it’s a snap to find your answer.

The answers themselves will still be there, like that great Screensteps article that helped you set up Outlook or the Maintenance Notice about the .COM registry being unavaliable. Sending in tickets and opening forum discussions will still go through Zendesk. The new Help site will simply make it all much easier.

I also thought I’d post a screenshot of the main page a couple of days early:

Sometimes the folks at Hover HQ need to get in touch with you to remind you to renew your subscription, ask you a question about your account or pass along legal notices as required by ICANN and other agencies.

We try not to send out too many, and limit the ones that we do send to those that are important to the operation of your Hover services.

Whenever we send them out, we get thousands of bounceback notices that indicates that people haven’t kept their contact information up to date. This is really disconcerting because sometimes it means that a legitimate customer might be at risk of losing access to their website, email, domain name or other services.

Checking and updating your contact information is a simple thing. There are three main sets of information that you should check on.

1. Your contact email address for your Hover account. We allow you to store a primary and secondary contact email address on file with us so that you can always be guaranteed that critical messages will get to you on time, all the time. For instructions on how to update your contact email address, click here.
2. Your billing information. The surest way to guarantee that you don’t get hit by a service interruption because your billing information was out of date is to check to make sure that we have all of your current billing information. This way, we can process your subscription renewals automatically each year, giving you the peace of mind that your email, DNS and other services will keep working. For more information on how to update your billing information, click here.
3. Your domain contact information. This contact information is perhaps the most important aspect of domain name ownership because we file it with the registry to demonstrate that you are the legitimate owner of the domain name. We allow you to update the registrant (owner) information, the billing contact and the administrative contact. If this information is accurate and correct, you are almost 100% guaranteed that you won’t lose your domain name to a miscreant. Instructions for updating your domain contact information can be found here. If you would like to ensure that your personal contact information isn’t displayed on the Internet, check out these great instructions for turning on Whois privacy, which will guarantee that no one will ever find out what your domain contact information is.

By following these 3 simple steps, you will virtually guarantee that you will never get locked out of your email account or lose your domain name because you inadvertently missed out on an important notice.

Of course, if you ever have questions about anything, feel free to drop us a note.

For a long time, our Subscribers have had a love/hate relationship with our Spam Filtering.  Some love the way we block spam and ideally would like it to be even more restrictive.  Some people did not like our Spam Filtering and wanted to manage it themselves. With our new Spam Settings in Webmail,  we have now answered both needs.

(a) loves the Hover Spam Filters and wanted to make our filtering even more restrictive to block even more spam :

Our new Spam Filtering Levels we now have access to three levels of increasingly restrictive rules to block spam (Normal, High and Very High) . Our Normal Level will attempt to block any spam messages that are coming into your Inbox.  You can increase to the higher levels of spam protection through the Spam Settings area in your Webmail.  Please check out:  http://about.hover.com/increasespamprotection

-or -

(b) do not like our Spam Filters and want to simply manage spam by myself:

Our new Spam Settings allow you to choose whatever folder you would like tor Spam Folder.  So if you choose your Inbox to be your Spam Folder, then all mail (even ones that are filtered as spam) will go directly into your Inbox.  To gain your this increased control, please go to http://about.hover.com/managespammyself

Lastly, I would like to thank you all for your continued feedback as to what works best for you.  We have a terrific forum specifically for working with spam found here: http://about.hover.com/spamfaq .  Please continue to give us your great suggestions as to how we can better serve you and help you combat spam.

We have been advised by Paypal that this issue will be solved within 1 hour – ETR is currently 6:30pmEDT. We will update again when we can verify this has been solved or if we have further info.

Again, thank you for your patience.

Do you love your registrar but hate their email or webmail service? If you are finding that your domain provider’s email is offline more than not, you might want to consider switching your email service to us.

Hover makes it a cinch to switch your mail service to us without the hassle of transferring your domain name, name servers or anything else super-complicated. Within minutes, your email can be up and running on our mail system.

Hover’s POP, IMAP and Webmail services are super-reliable (99.9% uptime for the last year) and well priced (as little as $6 per month!).

In a nutshell, all you need to do is

a) create your Hover account,
b) change your MX servers (way easier than it sounds),
c) create your mailboxes (no hassle, I promise) and
d) let the email flow!

Tyson, one of our awesome Hover customer advisors, created a great tutorial [link:http://about.hover.com/owndomainmail] outlining these steps in more detail. Suffer no more! Check out our email service today!

In working together with Comcast on the forwarding issues for some of their customers, we’re happy to report that we received word of progress made on the Comcast side. They have let us know that they have now made their filtering rules less stringent and this should assist some customers with being able to receive forwarded mail to their service.

1. If you were not able to receive your forwarded mail quickly due to tar-pitting caused by those recently-added, stricter overall filtering rules, this lowering of Comcast’s filtering level should clear up the issue for you. This also means that you will not have to lower the Spam protection level on your Comcast mailbox in order to receive your forwarded mail from Hover.

2. This will not help you receive forwarded mail to Comcast if Comcast’s filters have identified your address as having repeatedly transmitted Spam to their service. The tar-pitting of specific addresses is to guard their entire service from Spam and is a useful tool in maintaining the integrity of their system for all customers on Comcast email service.

If you find yourself in this situation, your best solution is to decrease the amount of Spam you receive. This can be done by removing yourself from mailing lists and by increasing the Spam protection level on your Hover account to capture more Spam here and prevent it from being transmitted to Comcast’s servers. In most cases, the tar-pitting is not permanent and as soon as their service stops being hit by Spam coming from your Hover address, your forwarded mail will flow through without delays again. You can easily turn up the Spam protection level on your Hover email by logging into your Email Settings page at https://mail.hover.com/settings

Over the past two weeks, Comcast has increased the spam protection on their mail system so that some of our Subscribers that are attempting to forward their email to Comcast are seeing either delays in delivery (some minor some major), or that email is not being delivered at all.  We have determined that there are actually two issues here, and we can offer the following advice:

1.  Spam filtering on your Comcast Email is actually blocking your legitimate mail from your Hover address. Subscribers are reporting that once their email spam filtering has been disabled on Comcast – all their email was delivered.  While we cannot guarantee that this will happen to you, we have created a Step-by-Step article to walk you through the process.

This will allow all email from Hover to be received at your Comcast address.

2. Comcast is tarpitting your forwarded Emails . When we speak about tarpitting, I think of Woolly Mammoths trapped in a tarpit and slowly sinking to their death.  That is what Comcast is doing.  They are slowing the email down for delivery, and if the messages are not delivered within a set time, they are not delivered at all.  That is why some people are stating email is delayed and others are stating that email is not being delivered.

Why are they doing this? Tarpitting is a common form of spam protection, the thinking is that if you are a spammer and you are sending lots of messages, you want them to be delivered (quickly) to all addresses.  If the spammer sees that their spam messages are not being immediately received, then maybe they will be discouraged enough to not attempt to send more spam.

Why me? Well you may be receiving a fair bit of email to your Hover email address from a mass mailing list – which many spam protection groups link as spam.  Things like the joke of the day, daily horoscope or even a newspaper subscription may be misinterpreted as spam because they are not being delivered just to you, but to large groups or tens of thousands of people everyday. Please use the “remove me from this mailing list” if you are no longer enjoying these types of emails. Another thing is that you may actually be receiving spam on your Hover email and this is being forwarded onto your Comcast email address.  When their automated system asks : Who sent the spam? The answer is you (the person who forwarded the email).  To avoid this, you could set your email to a higher spam protection on the Hover side of things by following this forum post:

http://stuff.hover.com/post/100653026/are-you-getting-too-much-spam ,

or by blocking more spam sources on your Hover Webmail.

We really want you to be able to forward your email to the address of your choice, and hope that this will be of assistance.

Hover Customer Service phone lines will be closed Monday August 4th, 2009 for the civic holiday to allow our advisors to spend time with their families.  There will be staff in the office that day responding to email issues.  Regular phone hours will resume the following day, Tuesday August 5th, 2009 at 9:00am ET.

Subscribers have asked for faster load times and have suggested a broad range of features that would improve their experience. We have been hard at work on an upgrade that incorporates these suggestions and more. Starting at 11am UTC tomorrow, you will automatically see the following in your Webmail:

- Faster Webmail Interface : faster and more reliable

- Autosaving of Messages Every 2 Minutes : don’t lose your responses

- Ability to Block/Show Images : protects you from unwanted images

- “My Dashboard” Feature : hide the left navigation panel in Webmail

- Font Size/Color/Style Features : choose your own color or text size

- Priorities: set the priority of your email

- Return Receipts: recieve a notice when someone has received your email

- Import/Export Address book: more features & easier to use

- Increase Threshold for Items Displayed Per Page : display no longer limited to 50

- Layout & Block/Safe Senders Lists to 300 Each: see 300 friends’ addresses added or 300 not-so-friendlies blocked

- Secure POP3 Mail Retrieval: download email from other providers

- Improved Search Capabilities: search by name / subject / or body of messages

Looking forward to your future suggestions to make our email better.

Yahoo! Shine has a great post on how to use email more effectively. Email can be tough, and sometimes we have to learn the rules the hard way. By following these tips, you will be sure to stay out of everyone’s junk folder.

1. Change the subject line every time you start a new conversation.
2. Don’t use email when another medium makes more sense.
3. Answer questions inline.
4. Don’t get the last word in.
5. Use the cc function sparingly.
6. Keep it brief.
7. Ask whether people prefer attachments or inline pasting.
8. Give up cutesy handles.
9. Use personal email for personal correspondence.
10. Say no to chain letters and jokes.
11. Avoid shared email addresses.

How to improve your email etiquette – Manage Your Life on Shine

We would also add tip #12 – dump those Hotmail and Gmail addresses for something more personalized. There’s no reason for you to be trippingout2123@gmail.com when you can be “ross@rader.net”. Check out our great Personalized Email services if you are interested in learning more.