[van-announce] Resist! Collective Newsletter

[Resist! Collective]

The Resist! Collective has been working hard to upgrade almost all of
the major systems on the server in order to correct technical problems
and to increase security. Because of this, you may have noticed some
downtime over the last few weeks. Some of the specifics you might be
interested in, as a system user, are listed below. All of the
significant problems resulting from the upgrades have been identified
and fixed. We expect the server to be much more reliable at this point.
If you notice anything unusual, please contact us at the email addresses
listed at http://help.resist.ca.

Thanks for your patience,
The Resist! Collective

In this newsletter:

	* Webmail Fixed
	* Calendar Fixed
	* Spam on Resist.ca
	* Mail Quotas Explained
	* Security Certificates Updated
	* Documentation Updated
	* Reminder to Change Passwords
	* Internet Explorer Vs. Mozilla
	* Contributions


Webmail Problems Fixed
----------------------
Until recently, many people were experiencing problems checking their
web email (https://mail.resist.ca) with Micro$oft's Internet Explorer
(version 5.0 -> 5.5). We have corrected a problem with the security
layer that caused IE to spit out errors when loading pages or sending
mail. People using those browsers should not be experiencing problems at
this point. If you are still experiencing these problems, please contact
us. Also see the note on Mozilla below.

Calendar Fixed
--------------
Internet Explorer users were also having problems viewing events in our
calendar (http://calendar.resist.ca). An upgrade in the software has
corrected the problem. Since then, the calendar of Vancouver and other
BC events has once again become a great resource for activists in the
area. We think it's the coolest calendar going. If you haven't seen it,
check it out.

Spam on Resist.ca
-----------------
We have recently added Realtime Blackhole Lists (RBL's) to resist.ca.
RBL's check every message coming to the server against a few trusted
sources to let us know if a message is known to be spam. We hope this
will reduce the amount of unsolicited email that makes it's way into
your resist.ca inbox. Beside this system-wide change, you can also see
http://help.resist.ca/email.php#spam for more information on what you
can do to further reduce your spam load.

Mail Quotas Explained
---------------------
By default, your resist.ca email account has a maximum storage of 10
Megabytes. Mail quotas on resist.ca include all email that you store on
the server. That is to say, your Inbox, your Sent folder, and your Trash
folder. It also includes any other folders you have created on the server.

Please try to keep the amount of mail you store on the server to a
minimum. If even a small fraction of our users used their entire quota,
we would run out of space quickly. Please try to regularly empty your
Sent and Trash folders. If you can use POP mail to download messages to
your local computer, it makes a big difference to us. Thanks for helping
out.

See http://help.resist.ca/email.php#space for more details.

Security Certificates Updated
-----------------------------
Last week, we changed certificate authorities. You should have seen a
warning about the security certificate changing when logging into your
email account. In order to not see warnings like this in future (unless
there is a real problem), please see the document at
http://help.resist.ca/rtc-ca-cert.php on how to properly install the
Root Certificate for your web browser or email client.

Documentation Updated
---------------------
The documentation on the website has been given a big facelift. This
includes the help pages (http://help.resist.ca), as well as several
documents about the Resist! Collective and our relationship to our users
including a new basis of unity (the statement of principles which you
probably agreed to when you got your resist.ca email account found at
http://resist.ca/special/basis), and a new mission statement
(http://resist.ca/special/mission).

These documents were modified with contributions from your suggestions
as well as discussions of collaboration with the Red Cursor Collective
(http://riseup.net).

Change your Password
--------------------
Changing your password regularly is an important part of maintaining the
security of the server. For the benifit of all of our users, please do
it soon. If you aren't sure how: http://help.resist.ca/email.php#passwd.

Internet Explorer Vs. Mozilla
-----------------------------
If you are still using IE, you shouldn't be! :) As political folks, we
hope you will want to check out http://mozilla.org for the Mozilla Web
Browser and Email client.

Not only does Mozilla rock, this free and opensource suite is built by a
community of programmers with an anti-corporate bent. Mozilla is
approximately as fast as IE and has all the functionality of IE plus
great features like popup blocking and tabbed browsing. The Mozilla mail
client offers intelligent spam blocking that learns as you tell it which
messages are spam and which aren't. Microsoft says it won't be putting
out a new version of IE until 2005.

Contributions Made Easier
-------------------------
We couldn't really do a newsletter without a pitch for contributions,
could we? As usual, donations (cash, labour or hardware) are hugely
appreciated. We can't thank folks enough who have helped us keep the
servers running over the last year or so through their financial
support. If you have been using our services and haven't contributed in
the last year, please consider kicking it down.

Recently, your donations have helped us to meet the increased hardware
requirements caused by an increase in the number of resist.ca users as
well as the month-to-month maintenance costs of keeping our systems online.

Kicking it down has recently become easier! We now offer you the option
of using Paypal to make your financial contribution. See
http://help.resist.ca/org.php#donate for more details.