November

WELCOME

Welcome to the Riseup Newsletter. Our newsletter is sent to all Riseup email users and mailing list administrators. Look for important updates, technical tips, donation information and occasional useless trivia. We send the newsletter in three languages: Portuguese, Spanish and English.

Today’s useless trivia: Currently, Riseup is supporting over 12,000 mailing lists. We have 1.4 million subscribers to all those lists.

ADDRESSING DELIVERY DELAYS FOR MAILING LISTS

We know how frustrating it can be when you send out a message to a mailing list and wait… and wait… and wait… for the message to appear. Sometimes, a glitch with the software causes the list program to stop working. But fixing the problem doesn’t immediately get your mail delivered because there is a large backlog of messages have accumulated and need to be delivered. This can cause the delays in delivery that some of you have noticed.

We realize how critical mailing lists are to your organizing and we want to try to address this issue. To that end, we’d like to purchase some new hardware to increase our capacity to clear out a backlog faster.

But to do this, we need your help! If you rely on Riseup’s services, we are asking you to donate to help us improve our services. Especially if you host a mailing list or subscribe to one, please consider a donation to help us improve the quality of our list service. Our goal is to raise a zillion dollars and your help is critical in reaching our goal!

SPAM AGONY

Some of you may have noticed an increase in spam lately. At the end of last month, in an effort to make our spam filtering better, we actually made things worse. For a couple days we were even bouncing some messages that we shouldn’t have (with a weird “Timeout” error). As soon as we were made aware of this problem we disabled a significant portion of our spam filtering until we could determine the cause, this resulted in a wave of spam coming in, we are sorry, we hate it too. But no more! The problem has been fixed for now. Did you know you can adjust your spam settings to be more sensitive to your needs? Login to http://user.riseup.net then click the “Email” button and then the “Spam settings” tab to adjust your settings.

HEY YOU! SWITCH TO SECURE-ONLY CONNECTIONS

Are you connecting to Riseup over a secured connection? If you aren’t, then you are exposing your email and password to anyone who wants to read it, if it’s email to your mom or your secret plans for society after industrial collapse (vegan donuts!?). How do you know if you are connecting securely? Well, read on!

To accommodate older programs, Riseup has historically provided webmail, IMAP and POP connections to both secured connections, and non-secured connections. We have always wanted to switch to secure only connections, but for years we have held off because we didn’t want to leave some people out in the cold. It gets cold out there.

However, we believe that the software support has finally reached a state where we can disable all non-secure methods of connecting to our servers. Now we just need you to switch to secure connections, if you aren’t already. There is no hurry, we aren’t doing this soon, we just want you to know it is coming and we will be eventually switching completely, and until we do switch we will be educating you on how to go about this. So watch this space!

So, are you connecting to Riseup over a secure connection? Check this page to find out: https://help.riseup.net/security/measures/#how_do_i_know_if_i_am_using_a_secure_connection

Learn more about email and online security through our Riseup help pages: http://help.riseup.net/security/about/

THANK YOU FOR DONATING

For everyone who has donated in the past few months, a big thank you! Your donations keep us running. And it is through the continued support of the Riseup users that we are able to provide Riseup services. For more information on donating, please see http://riseup.net/donate for information on how to donate.

In solidarity, the riseup collective