One of our clients had his weblog cut off with the dreaded Bandwidth Limit Exceeded notice:

Bandwidth Limit Exceeded
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.

Richard’s visitors had pumped 80 GB out already this month on his FreeTheAnimal weblog primal living weblog. Not bad for a single writer not in a formal network. Every month his traffic is growing. Congratulations Richard!

These 80 GB of bandwidth are the real thing, with just a few slightly overweight images, not a single big file accidentally uploaded.

Richard was surprised and upset to see his weblog cut off as were we. While most hosts cut clients off as a routine matter of business, we do not. We treat our clients as we would like to be treated ourselves.

Two of Foliovision’s core hosting policies are:

1. never cut off a client’s site for bandwidth
2. no bandwidth overages

Clearly this is a clear violation of our hosting and customer service commitment. We recently moved from the dreadful hSphere control panel to the comparative friendliness of cPanel. We knew how to fix this issue in hSphere but had missed adding it in our default cPanel server setup. Here's how you make cPanel behave much more courteously with your customers.

Start by turning off bandwidth cutoffs. It’s in WHM under Server Configuration, Tweak Settings:

whm tweak settings bandwidth limits

A very big page of options come up. Search for: “Disable Suspending accounts that exceed their bandwidth limit”:

disable suspending accounts bandwidth limit

While you are at it, you may as well hit up your users with email warnings at 80 and 90 and 95% bandwidth so they can ask for an upgrade or at least are ready for their upgrade when it comes. Unfortunately, these notifications only go to the client and not to you.

To go without bandwidth overage cutoff this, we need to know when clients are exceeding bandwidth so we can upgrade them. There doesn’t seem to be any simple notification system for admins. A workaround would be to create an account notification email for each client on your own hosting email account which is forwarded to them and then to you. Advantage is that you’d see what snarky emails your automated server software is sending out on your behalf to alienate clients. Still that’s lots of extra work when setting up an account and another moving part to break.

But there is a screen available in WHM: Account Information: View Bandwidth Usage.

It’s a lot of trouble to open up to WHM find that and click it. So I created direct browser bookmarks to our two cPanel servers which look like this:

http://91.162.85.74:2086/scripts/showbw

(change the numbers above for your own server’s WHM IP)

This gives you this very helpful chart to see who is in the yellow and red zone. I’ve already adjusted everyone’s plans to get them back into the white so sadly there’s no yellow or red on this chart.

disable suspending accounts bandwidth limit

If anyone knows how to get automated notices sent to server admin as well, please share the wealth.

No “Bandwidth limit exceeded”: How to manage bandwidth limits in cPanel hosting courteously

Post from: Foliovision

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1. How to Choose a Hosting Company
2. How to move clients email accounts (or your own) from one server to another with no lost mail
3. Setting Up Email Securely on cPanel servers: example WiredTree

"Toolbar set 'Foliovision' doesn’t exist"

We decided to not use that file anymore and moved all the configuration options for FCKEditor into inline JavaScript. That should fix the problem.

If you had this problem, download the latest version of our plugin (0.9.14) here. This new version fixes this problem and also some other bugs in file management.

We will be glad to hear any feedback on our Foliopress WYSIWYG plugin page.

New Foliopress WYSIWYG version

Post from: Foliovision

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We also added support for videos and splash images stored on HTTPS servers.

Summary:

• compatibility fixes for WP 3.0 and older plugin shortcodes
• compatibility fixes for IE 6
• HTTPS support
• plugin settings moved from file into Wordpress options table (this will provide easier updates and less configuration issues from now on)

Download the latest version of FV Wordpress Flowplayer plugin.

Older versions of the plugin can be found on the Wordpress plugin site.

HTTPS support for FV Flowplayer

Post from: Foliovision

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2. New FV Wordpress Flowplayer version

• Autoplay for single videos
• Show/hide the control bar
• Show/hide the full-screen button
• Uploads through WP Media Library
• Redirection option

We tested the plugin also under Wordpress 3.0, and all features were found compatible.

Download the latest version of FV Wordpress Flowplayer plugin.

Older versions of the plugin can be found on the Wordpress plugin site.

FV Wordpress Flowplayer is compatible with Wordpress 3.0

Post from: Foliovision

Related posts:

1. HTTPS support for FV Flowplayer
2. New FV Wordpress Flowplayer version

We released a new version (0.9.13) which will fix the annoying autosave glitch -

"The changes you made will be lost if you navigate away from this page." 

This message was appearing even when there were no changes made to the post, since we added the autosave support in previous version.

Other fixes and features:

• Added language support
• Wordpress caption support (they will be put under the image into h5 tag)
• Image uploader permissions are now configurable
• Autosave glitch fixed

New Foliopress WYSIWYG update

Post from: Foliovision

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Here's how we do it and how we did it, comparing SpamAssassin, Mailfoundry and SpamSieve (Apple only unfortunately, but there are Windows alternatives available, including the built-in filter in Thunderbird).

cPanel comes with SpamAssassin by default. SpamAssassin is powerful software but can come up with false positives. The default setup is 5. Moving it up to 8 or even 6 will reduce your false positives substantially. Viagra type spam comes in at 12 plus. At WiredTree, they have configured email with Exim to extensively use RBL (real time blackhole). This is so very important as a huge amount of spam doesn’t even reach SpamAssassin or your inbox. Unlike spam filtering, RBL filtering is quite accurate. Not only that but your legitimate correspondents will get a bounce notice so they can try and contact you via other means. Given the profluence of social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter), contact forms and free email services (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail just to name the big three) if they can’t be bothered contacting you otherwise, you probably didn’t need the email.

The other huge advantage of RBL filtering is the amount of spam which you have to check by hand, goes way, way down.

Previously we used MailFoundry at CartikaHosting which was reasonably accurate but suffered from the following problems:

• far too much spam gets through to the blocked list which means you have a lot of spam to comb by hand
• far too many false positives which means you have to go through those lists, as MailFoundry learns from experience (i.e. if you allow false positives, the situation will get worse, unlike most installs of SpamAssassin where the chances of a false positive will stay the same)
• a separate report for every mailbox, even when you redirect them to a single bulk mailbox. When you have a lot of emails to cover (my situation), getting 7 to 20 spam reports to check per day, leaves you with nearly 150 per week. I dreaded getting those MailFoundry reports. With SpamAssassin, all the spam gets filtered in the bulk mailbox and I have just a single mailbox full of spam to check occasionally and which can be sorted by from addresss, date or subject line.

After dumb SpamAssassin (non-learning), one can add a local learning spam filter on your primary computer (it won’t help with your secondary machines) to reduce spam still further. I use Michael Tsai’s SpamSieve and am very satisfied with it. Given the amount of email which goes through my computer, state of the art is worth the investment for me. Both Thunderbird and Apple Mail come with quite decent built-in Bayesian filters which would probably do for most people.

With your SpamAssassin settings up at 8, you won't have too many false positives (default 5 is dangerous) but with a local trainable filter (setting up and managing training filters in SpamAssassin is far too painful even on IMAP), you won't see much spam either and you can train your own ham (marginal spam) to pass your local filters.

The next nice trick that SpamAssassin has is the spam box. It will automatically file everything away where you don’t have to see it unless you want to. Spam will be removed from your inbox before it gets there. That’s very important for Blackberry and mobile mail users as the last thing you want on the road are notifications for spam. Moreover, on these mobile devices it’s not easy or inexpensive to run spam filtering. You can even route your spam to a secondary mailbox based on the subject line. In the secondary mailbox it will be directly routed to the spam folder based on the subject line, further reducing the number of spam boxes one has to check. The disadvantage is that any false positives will be much harder to find in one’s secondary mailbox (thousands of spam per week, in comparison to the tens of spam per week in my primary mailbox).

By leaving my bulk email in POP with SpamAssassin, smart filters and Bayesian filters, I end up with just a SpamAssassin spam box to check and my local SpamSieve filter. The best of both worlds.

This is a huge advantage over MailFoundry and its endless reports. I'm very happy to be away from Cartika Hosting's Hsphere/Mailfoundry combination and back on cPanel/SpamAssassin with RBL at Wiredtree.

Fighting Spam: SpamAssassin vs MailFoundry vs SpamSieve

Post from: Foliovision

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2. Apple Mail, IMAP, IDLE and Smart Mailboxes don’t mix well, spike CPU
3. Losing Mail with Google Apps

Email is not private. Don’t forget that ever. Email is not private.

Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Outlook Express (and the hideous blue Windows Live Writer replacement) all offer SSL. But be sure not to check “Secure Authentication” if your particular host does not support it. Secure Authentication just has to do with security certificates and does not actually increase your security once you have an appropriately made self-signed certificate. Just be careful about authorising changes to your security certificate.

SSL IMAP will go across port 993. SSL POP will go across port 995. Checking your port assignment is one way to be sure your email connection is encrypted. SMTP SSL will work across port 25 (and probably some others, but I've tested port 25).

SSL will get you most of the way there to reasonable privacy.

While you are at it, make sure that when you access webmail (with cPanel at http://yourdomain.com/webmail, the connection forwards to an https address.

Don’t forget that when you are visiting other login protected websites, unless the connection is https, you are handing over your login and password to the owner of the hotspot (if he cares to log it or take it). If you plan to spend a lot of time on hotspots as a traveller, you need more than SSL email. You need a VPN. Don’t go cheap or unbranded on your VPN supplier (setting up your own VPN is a big enough hassle that most small businesses should be outsourcing their VPN connections), as that organisation will have steady access to all of your communication and can keep really detailed logs. Unlike a single rogue hotspot, you will be using the VPN consistently over time and with a the same login.

These steps should not be considered security overkill, but just the basics.

Setting Up Email Securely on cPanel servers: example WiredTree

Post from: Foliovision

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1. Lost WordPress Admin Password and Email? How to get back into your weblog…
2. How to move clients email accounts (or your own) from one server to another with no lost mail
3. No “Bandwidth limit exceeded”: How to manage bandwidth limits in cPanel hosting courteously

If the account is POP, your task is fairly straightforward.

You want to make sure that you move any unread move (mail from between the time your client last collected email and the time of the move is picked up and put on the new mail server). The best way to do that is to log into the old mail server and the new mail server via IMAP simultaneously. You will see what has been read and what hasn't. Just move the unread messages.

If you move the read messages, when your client logs in again via POP, he or she will have to sort through a 1000 or even 3000 archived messages in the inbox. Not fun.

We recommend using Apple Mail as the IMAP client as it's very easy and quick to set up. Windows Live Mail hides the IMAP accounts and folders and is ugly as sin. Thunderbird is very fiddly and exposes too many options but could do in a pinch or if you don't have a Mac handy.

After the move, there may also be a small lag while your client is only seeing the old server for reasons of DNS cache and won't get his or her new mail. For that reason, it's better to shut down the old mail server immediately after transferring the mail so he/she can't be picking up mail from both places at once.

For that reason I recommend doing the move at night at 3 in the morning, as your client has probably turned off his or her computer so the DNS will be renewed in the morning. If not, you'll have to ask them to flush their DNS cache (it's easy enough via GUI without IPconfig: turn on and off networking in the network control panel in Windows, Macs will flush the DNS automatically by switching network configurations). In the case, that even that is too technical, a restart will do the trick.

For a truly seamless move, it's essential that your host is using a modern convention for the mail login and smtp. All of our good hosts are using mail.domainname.com for POP, IMAP and SMTP. You will probably also be so lucky. If that's not the case, then you definitely have to involve the client in the move so that they will have the new login information.

At Foliovision, we proceed on the principle that our clients don't want to know about the IT unless they absolutely have to. They have work to take care of. It's up to us to sweat the details. And when we say sweat, we mean it. Ideally, they'd never notice that anything ever was changed or went wrong.

In principle, after moving from one host to another you should change all your passwords (the old ones are compromised from the previous host). In practice, I recommend keeping the passwords the same initially so that all of a client's automated logins will keep working. One doesn't want to be troubleshooting passwords and account moves simultaneously. As long as the passwords are the same, the move should be seamless.

Of course in most cases your clients will have to authorise the new server for email. Most will do so as a matter of course. (Get asked enough about security, you stop caring.)

If your client is already using IMAP, your task becomes much more sophisticated. If he or she is just using the standard IMAP mailboxes (Junk, Sent, Trash), your life is pretty simple. In this case, you simply move the contents of each mailbox (including Inbox) to the new account. When your client logs in, the messages will match and he/she will carry on work as before.

If your client has a sophisticated server side nest of mailboxes, you have a lot more work in front of you. First you have to duplicate the mailbox structure by hand and then drag the contents of each mailboxes over by hand. Dragging and dropping whole mailboxes won't work (at least in Apple Mail), as they are made into subfolders of the inbox.

In that case, you can look at zipping up the maildir folders, moving them over and resetting permissions. That leaves you no guarantee that the accounts are working properly. So if it's not a high volume mail move, I recommend a move by hand to be sure everything is working properly before you leave the job.

Here's some gotchas to look out for with a mail moves. Basically, POP ignores IMAP's read and unread flags.

• For IMAP moves, careful not to touch unread mail on the server as the client may never see it (his/her email client will ignore read mail)
• when POP picks up mail, they are marked as read in IMAP (bad).
• if mail is marked as read in IMAP, it still gets downloaded via POP as unread (bad).

STEP BY STEP GUIDES

First check the mail server logs to see which clients log in via POP and which login via IMAP. It's all there in black and white with usernames. You need root access for this or submit a support ticket for shared hosting.

Here's the step by step guide for POP moves:

1. set up new mail account on new server
2. set up IMAP account for old account in Apple Mail
3. set up IMAP account for new account in Apple Mail
4. drag only the unread contents to the new account
5. archive the old account for a few days (by disabling the mailbox: don't forget to delete all these accounts within a week for privacy reasons)

Here's the step by step guide for IMAP moves:

1. set up new mail account on new server
2. set up IMAP account for old account in Apple Mail
3. set up IMAP account for new account in Apple Mail
4. recreate the mailbox structure of the existing IMAP account
5. drag all the contents to the new mailboxes one by one
6. archive the old account for a few days (by disabling the mailbox: don't forget to delete all these accounts within a week for privacy reasons)

How to move clients email accounts (or your own) from one server to another with no lost mail

Post from: Foliovision

Related posts:

1. Apple Mail, IMAP, IDLE and Smart Mailboxes don’t mix well, spike CPU
2. Ghost Apple Mail Messages: “Show in Mailbox”
3. Lost WordPress Admin Password and Email? How to get back into your weblog…

The problem seemed to be around Apple Mail. I'm new to IMAP so I decided to dig deeper. I initially thought the issue was with Rules, as I have SpamSieve and many dozens of rules to deal with bulk email (things I might want to read but don't want in my InBox).

The problems turns out to be something else altogether: 

Smart Mailboxes. Every time you get new mail your Smart Mailboxes folders update their unread counts: "Updating Smart Mailbox Unread Counts" is the message you will see in Mail's Activity Monitor.

Apple Mail
Smart Mailboxes
Spiking CPU

I have a lot of Smart Mailboxes (great feature, btw) which allow me to check how many leads each of my clients received this week and this year. At a glance, I can see how business is going (don't forget to weed out automated tests occasionally). Some of these mailboxes have many thousands of messages. Updating them takes a few seconds each.

These Smart Mailboxes get updated every time you get even one new email.

Normally I check my email manually only which means these updates don't happen very often and happen at a time when I'm working in Mail and am not surprised or bothered by 15 seconds of sluggishness. On the other hand, with my primary account as IMAP on IDLE that meant every time I received a single email all my spam filters and Smart Mailboxes updates ran each time. Given that even my primary email gets at least a couple of hundred emails per day, that's more workstops than I'm willing to put up with.

The simplest solution then would be to close Mail altogether when I'm not using it. This option doesn't appeal to me at all as I use Mail for reference and for writing messages even when I'm not checking for new messages.

1. First issue: with IDLE checked (if it works, it often doesn't), you will get new message pushed to you like it or not. Turn off IDLE
2. Second issue: make sure your general preferences are set to update only manually.
3. Third, pray.

This will probably stop IMAP from updating automatically, making life much better again. At least when Mail is a background application.

Preferences checking for new mail manually in Apple Mail

If you click into Mail and start looking at IMAP messages for every unread message you read, the whole cycle of Smart Mailbox updates start again. There is the feeling of sluggishness.

That's the price of using IMAP in Apple Mail apparently. There is no solution I can find, apart from deleting all your Smart Mailboxes. Which makes Apple Mail no better than any other Mail client, albeit a little bit prettier.

I thought I had a solution here, but in the end but just found a problem. Not even prayer will help here.

What we need is a way to turn Smart Mailboxes on and off (I don't need them all the time, I just need them when I'm in the mood to do a bit of analysis). Deleting them all and recreating them is not really an option. It took me weeks to refine them.

One way of dealing with this would be to disable Spotlight (which would stop smart filtering) but that would mean no advanced search function, something I use everyday.

The only workable solution is an on and off option (probably in right click) for Smart Filters. Or even by each Smart Filter with right click. I don't expect that from Apple. But perhaps someone can find a hidden preference that we can use from the command line. Otherwise one has to go back to POP (not as much of an issue with POP as there seems to be a delay before the filters update).

Are there no heavy Mail users at Apple, who use Smart Filters in their work and use IMAP too?

Apple Mail, IMAP, IDLE and Smart Mailboxes don’t mix well, spike CPU

Post from: Foliovision

Related posts:

1. Ghost Apple Mail Messages: “Show in Mailbox”
2. Apple Mail: Migrating from POP to IMAP Smoothly for Power Users
3. How to move clients email accounts (or your own) from one server to another with no lost mail

One bad thing, people's expectations that Wordpress 3.0 is:

1. bug free
2. compatible with current plugins

No way guys. There's no way that most popular plugins are ready for 3.0. So unless you are willing to go on a severe plugin and functionality diet, just forget about Wordpress 3.0 for a couple of months.

It's the same deal when Apple releases a new version of their OS (back in classic days or with OS X). You don't want 10.6.0 or 10.6.1 or even 10.6.2. Applications don't work and are incompatible. The sweet spot to move is the .4 or the .5 iteration.

Frankly, I'm still running 10.5.8 on my main computer and have had less headaches as a consequence. I'm about ready to move, as all my software now has Snow Leopard updates and all of the other workarounds have been published by those who love to live on the bleeding edge. Still I might skip 10.6 altogether though and move to 10.7 when it's ready. My girlfriend's Macbook is running 10.6 and the only thing I'm missing out on are the built-in scanner drivers (works great with our HP C3180, unlike HP's own software). Oh and Acorn 2, which is the best photo edit tool I've seen outside of Photoshop.

The crazy thing are greedy clients who want the latest and greatest before the paint is even dry. We just finished a huge Typepad to Wordpress move using our current plugin set (there's a fair amount of moving parts to make a T2WP conversion seamless) and one gentleman is clamouring for his free upgrade to Wordpress 3.0.

First we are not part of Wordpress incorporated (that's called Automattic). Second, he is running a media site and he needs all those plugins which haven't been even tested yet on Wordpress 3.0.

One step at a time.

Fortunately this time, Matt has promised to take some time off from developing core code and Wordpress will distribute their efforts to improving the Wordpress.org site and resources. A much better idea.

Normally this is where I’d say we’re about to start work on 3.1, but we’re actually not. We’re going to take a release cycle off to focus on all of the things around WordPress....so much of our effort has been focused on the core software it hasn’t left much time for anything else. Over the next three months we’re going to split into ninja/pirate teams focused on different areas of the around-WordPress experience, including the showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org

We have more than enough functionality. Just keep the API's running clean and keep improving the invisible code.

Only one big disappointment: Foliovision is not yet on the list of contributors for core code. We'll have to settle for the best alternative WYSIWYG editor and best image publishing system on the Wordpress platform. We also have the best Wordpress comment moderation system and the best free Flash video player plugin for Wordpress. Well maybe that last is a dubious honour as Flash is on its last legs but lots of people love FV Flowplayer.

Thanks and congratulations to those who did make it and created the core of the latest Wordpress.

We'll be busy over the next couple of months getting all of our plugins up-to-date and compatible with 3.0. For our users, no worries, all of our current active plugins will be making the transition.

I thought it would be time to congratulate our former CTO John Godley but strangely John's not on the list yet either, despite having written the best set of plugins out there and now working for Automattic.

Wordpress 3.0: Upgrade Considerations for Commercial Users

Post from: Foliovision

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