PowerUp!

Yesterday, we instituted some changes to email that a number of people haven’t particularly cared for. This is understandable, considering there haven’t been any limits on attachment sizes, daily bandwidth use, etc., except in a few rare cases. When you’ve been able to use a service unencumbered for such a long time, “limits” aren’t a great thing to have placed upon you.

Unfortunately, these changes have become a necessity. We understand that most of our users could be described as “typical” email users - you might send a larger attachment here and there. Some users have been using our mail service to send files 5+Mb and higher to multiple recipients. If, say, that email went to 20 recipients, that’s 100Mb worth of bandwidth that’s been used. If it went to a 1000 recipients, that’s 5,000Mb of bandwidth used. It adds up and that’s just ONE message being sent out by ONE user! Multiply that by a thousand or more and you’ll start to get a glimpse of the traffic our mail servers are getting on a daily basis.

When email is misused to send out large files to multiple recipients (and even transporting files to and from home) this causes a traffic jam of sorts for other users. That’s why we had to impose a cap of 2Mb on attachments, and a daily cap of 20Mb. People were exceeding this level all too often, and it was degrading the level of service for other customers.

So, where do we go from here? We’re looking at a couple of options right now, but we haven’t established a timeframe or the best course of action to take. We will be posting updates here to our blog and we’ll be emailing an announcement to all of our email users as soon as we make a decision on what to do next.

We appreciate your patience.

Due to abuse of our email server we have been forced to place limits on all outgoing mail. In recent weeks we have had our ability to properly deliever email hindered by emails of large size being sent to a large number of people. While most of the senders did not know the files were too large for email, the fact we had no set limit allowed these emails to come to our server and waste time that could be used for emails that were of standard size.

Due to these abuses the new limits are as follows:

• The new max size for emails is now set to 2mb.
• The new max email amount per day is 20mb.

This means that a single message can not be larger than 2mb and you can not send out more than 20mb of email per day.

We realize these changes will make it so some people are not able to send out emails as they did in the past. To further help with these new limits we would like to supply you with a few helpful links.

If you need to email files that are close to 2mb you can try to ZIP them using a program such as Winzip (shareware) or the open-source application 7-Zip. These two programs will compress your files and make them smaller in size and may allow them to be under the max limit.

If your files are much larger than 2mb you may want to try a file hosting service, such as You Send It or zUpload.

If you have email such as newsletters we do offer a newsletter service for all clients. Please contact us for further information. Or you can also look at Constant Contact or Campaign Monitor for newsletter services.

On Friday, August 18th PowerServe moved into its new offices at 959 Broad Street in downtown Augusta. We’re not that far from where we were, but the new office has a lot more space - and we’re happy about that.

For your records, our new address is:

Not only did our address change during the move, our phone extensions did as well. Simply add a 1 before the extension you were trying to reach (i.e. Extension 11 is now 111).

Apple releases Boot Camp 1.1 Beta. Geeks rejoice. Too bad Parallels is a nicer solution…

Dell is voluntarily recalling 4.1 million laptop batteries. Ruh roh. Apple, HP, and other manufacturers affected as well…

We’re looking for another full-time programmer/analyst. Must have one to three years of experience developing web-based, database-drive systems using ASP and SQL Server. B.S. in Computer Science (or related field) preferred. Strong problem-solving and organizational skill srequired. Must be proficient in ASP, VBScript and JavaScript. Must have experience with SQL Server, MySQL, and MS Access. ASP.Net, COM/DCOM, ADO, XML, Crystal Reports, a plus. PowerServe offers competitve salaries and benefits. For immediate consideration, please email your resume to Jeff Partl. For additional on this position, please visit: jobs.powerserve.net.

At this time we are not considering candidates for sponsorship or relocation; candidates must be both local and eligible to work in the United States.

Salary commensurate with experience and skill level.

Please Note: Resumes will only be considered if sent via email. Walk-ins and phone calls not accepted. Thanks.

Please Note: Resumes will only be considered if sent via email. Walk-ins and phone calls not accepted. Thanks.