Hosted Email: Insecure Connections being phased out 1st June, 2020

We have always tried to make it easy for customers to use our Hosted Email service and this includes supporting a wide array of protocols, encryption methods and ports.

Encrypted connections to mail servers are now commonplace and all modern mail clients support them. Over 75% connections to our Hosted Email service are currently encrypted.

We will be phasing out insecure IMAP, POP3 and SMTP email connections on our Hosted Email platform on the 1st June, 2020. We will be contacting clients directly affected by this change multiple times and will have a number of blackout hours as outlined in the timetable below.

  • 23rd – 27th March 2020: We will look at incoming insecure connections and email clients directly affected letting them know they have until the 1st June 2020 to sort this and offer assistance if necessary.
  • 20th – 24th April 2020: We will generate a new list of remaining insecure connections and email clients with a reminder.
  • 18th – 22nd May 2020: We will generate a new list of remaining insecure connections and email clients with a final reminder.
  • 25th, 27th and 29th May 2020: At 10am UK time we will disable insecure IMAP, POP3 and SMTP connections for 1 hour.
  • 1st June 2020: We will disable insecure IMAP, POP3 and SMTP connections permanently.

To ensure you are connecting to our Hosted Email service securely and to ensure you’re using our most up to date, recommended mail client settings, please visit this help page: https://blog.anu.net/hosted-email-connection-settings/

If you have any questions, concerns or feedback or if you need any assistance, do not hesitate to contact us by emailing support@anu.net

CentOS 8 now available at Anu

While we have a small percentage of other distributions running for specific purposes, our standard Linux distribution of choice is CentOS. CentOS is an Enterprise Linux distribution which is ideally suited for long term and stable server deployments. This is in contrast to distributions like Fedora, which has a fast release cycle, the latest cutting edge software versions, and is targeted more at end users and developers.

Major CentOS version releases only come around every 3-4 years, so when a new version comes along it is a great opportunity to upgrade older servers. Major new releases always bring new features as well as security and performance enhancements, but can also pose challenges if your application or code base requires major upgrades or changes to run smoothly on the new OS.

CentOS 8 was recently released and is now available for new VM deployments at Anu.

CentOS 6 will become end of life on 30 November 2020, so now would be a good time to start planning to upgrade either to CentOS 7 or 8.

We recognise that a major OS upgrade can be time consuming and challenging for some customers. In order to facilitate a smooth upgrade, we offer our customers running CentOS 6 and 7 a complimentary new CentOS 8 VM with the same spec, running in parallel to the existing VM. Should it be required, we can provide migration support including data transfer and porting configurations for a modest fee. Once customer applications have been tested and are running smoothly on the new VM, the old one is deleted and billing switches to the new VM.

In case the customer requires more than 30 days to complete the upgrade, both servers will be billed after 30 days, until the transfer is complete.

Not sure which CentOS version you’re running? Check the Webmin dashboard, or run ‘cat /etc/redhat-release‘ from the command line.

Ready to upgrade? Ping us an email on support@anu.net and we’ll get you started.

[Completed] Amsterdam 1 datacenter maintenance

Our engineers will be performing essential maintenance work on 2 core switches in our Amsterdam 1 datacenter on Monday 13th January.

No major disruption is expected however individual servers and services may be inaccessible for up to 1 minute.

Our support team will be on hand to respond to any alerts or tickets as required. If your site or server experiences any disruption please contact us without delay on support@anu.net

Estimated start time: 19:00

Estimated time of completion: 22:00

This maintenance has been completed