We have received a large amount of Support Requests today from Verizon DSL Subscribers over the last 36 hours.

After our own research, and communication with other web hosting and email providers, we have confirmed that Verizon has started blocking Port 25 (SMTP) access on their platform.

For many years, PhireFast has run an SMTP Relay on Port 26 for our clients facing this restriction from their ISPs, which until now has mainly only been AT&T DSL and Earthlink.

The Fix: Simply access your email program’s settings and change your POP3 email account’s SMTP port from 25 to 26 and you should be alright. IMAP platform users are not affected by Verizon’s switch-over.

The Reason: Many ISPs block port 25 to prevent the transit of spam on their network. By blocking access to this common port, one extra layer of “protection” (or so they say) is added to their network.

As always, please feel free to ask us for help by submitting a Support Request.

Thank you for hosting with us!

For users of the awesome instant messaging client Pidgin, you should have a look at this and update your libpurple library when possible.

Just download and install the latest version of Pidgin. It will automatically upgrade your current version.

US-CERT Emailed today:

Pidgin has released a security advisory to address a vulnerability affecting libpurple. This vulnerability is a buffer overflow that may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code. Libpurple is used by multiple instant messenger (IM) programs including Adium and Pidgin.

IM applications that use libpurple may distribute it as a part of their security updates. Users are encouraged to update affected IM software as soon as possible. A partial listing of IM programs that implement libpurple can be found in the “What is libpurple?” webpage on the Pidgin website. Additional information may be found in the US-CERT Vulnerability Notes Database.

For our clients who run Invision Software, Invision has released Power Board 3.0.2 today!

Excerpted from their email blast earlier today, new features include:

* Improved search and member list performance
* Date filter options for Active Content page
* Many improvements for Sphinx searching (i.e. ability to filter by forum, ability to search titles only, ability to group posts as topics, plugin functionality for modifying the query, and misc bug fixes)
* Ability to hide an application’s tab on the front end, while still allowing it to be publicly accessible
* Improved IP address lookup tool can now support add-on applications
* Portal option to not pin pinned topics for articles
* Added link to user profile when editing a member in ACP
* Added display of time remaining for suspended members when editing a member in ACP
* Spam Monitoring Service support
* Ability to control image quality for Gallery images (jpg/png only)
* PHP version 5.3 is now supported in IP.Board except for OpenID login method. We are awaiting updates from OpenID vendors.

These features look promising, and I recommend if you can, upgrade to it! The improvements to the search are worth it alone, in my opinion.

Also from their email:

You can download IP.Board 3.0.2 and any applications you have an active license for in the client area. As always, make a backup of your community before proceeding.

If you need a hand with this, let us know! We’re here for you, day and night.

Happy foruming! Thanks for hosting with PhireFast!