Status of Validation E-Mails

The Reverse DNS entry for our authentication server was added and came online Saturday morning. To further ensure that our e-mails are not flagged as spam, we've been added to AOL's Whitelist (though messages are being accepted) and will be effective within a day.

This means users who sign for for a WifiDog account and use an AOL address will receive a validation e-mail and validate their account.

Hotmail users are still not going to get our validation e-mails. I'm going to contact their Postmaster and see if they can add us to their Whitelist too.

Update:

Hotmail users will now be able to receive our validation e-mails.

Validation E-mails - Reverse DNS Update

Our Internet Service Provider is going to provide us with a DNS record that will be associated with the IP address of our authentication server. That means that when someone does a reverse DNS lookup of 198.109.89.170, it should bring back the domain name ioscoarenaclibrary.org. That should satisfy the various e-mail provider's automated spam checks and allow the validation e-mail through.

It should be up and running by the end of the weekend or as early as tomorrow morning.

After which, Hotmail and AOL providers should allow the message through without delay, and it shouldn't be flagged as spam.

Update, Hotmail Users

Those with Hotmail addresses that sign up for our Public Wireless service will not receive our validation e-mails at this time.

However, given that there many people who use Hotmail as their e-mail provider, I have opened a ticket with Hotmail in an effort to resolve the issue.

In the meantime, it is recommended that either you sign up with a non-Hotmail address (mail.com, Yahoo, and Gmail all work) or you can have your account manually validated.

WifiDog Validation E-Mail Issue

It has come to my attention that new users have not been receiving validation e-mails when they sign up on our Public Wifi System. I plan to repair this problem on Saturday, the 19th.

Update:

The auth software was successfully upgraded and e-mail validation is working correctly. However, there appears to be a bug with New Account Signup. The problem is that when a user signs up for a new account, an error message comes up stating "Access Denied" or some problem with the portal. Simply go back on your web browser, logout and log back in with your new account and continue the validation process.

Update 2:
Hotmail users will not be able to receive a validation e-mail. I confirmed that e-mails were successfully sent by our authentication server, but were not received by Hotmail.

At this time, the following e-mail providers are known to accept the validation e-mail: Yahoo, Charter, Peoplepc, Mail.com and Gmail. Other e-mail accounts (such as AOL) should accept the message, but may be falsely flagged as spam, so be sure to check your spam/junk folders. The message is sent immediately after clicking the Signup button and should be received by your e-mail provider and arrive in your inbox within a couple minutes or less.

April Software Updates

This month's round of software updates is short and will be completed Friday night, April 11. It includes:

Flash Player
QuickTime
Java

Also, I'm adding Microsoft Works compatibility to Microsoft Office. This will allow full compatibility with documents created on Microsoft Works from versions 6-9; including documents created on Vista.

This summer, we will finally be upgrading all installations of Microsoft Office to 2007 Professional Plus. In addition, document conversion for OpenOffice.org will be added to Office 2007, but OpenOffice.org will be kept and maintained on all public and staff computers.

For ease of compatibility across platforms, Office 2007 will be configured to save documents in Office 2003 or earlier by default. Office 2007 compatibility is currently not available for OpenOffice.org for Windows. However, Ubuntu users can install a compatibility extension for OpenOffice.