New Spam & Virus filtering mail server now operating
We have introduced new mailserver software that scans incoming email for suspicious SPAM content & virus's. If the software detects a suspect SPAM mail it will preceded the SUBJECT line with ****SPAM**** .. This allows you to set your email program to automatically delete (filter to the trash), any messages beginning with ****SPAM**** in the subject. See your email program's help files for information on how to do this. (In OutLoook Express its called "rules"). The server is updated twice per day with the latest virus information, and emails are also checked for virus attachments, if detected the virus will be deleted, and NOT passed on to you. You will however receive an email saying that a virus was detected and deleted by our server. We cannot be 100% sure it will stop them all, but we are confident it will detect over 95% of virus's. .i.e.. You should still keep your computers virus program up to date, as virus's can get to your machine in other ways apart from email, and as per usual, we still recommend NOT replying to any OPT-OUT email SPAM that may get through our defenses.

My email stopped when I installed Norton Anti-Virus
This has happened to thousands of people world wide. The solution/fix can be found on THIS page. Or if the page can't be loaded, go to www.symantec.com/search/ and then search for "email settings are changed" .. That search should result in another method of accessing the relevant page.

What is ......  ??
Here's a great site for anyone wanting to know what that TCP/IP thingy is that they have to set up to connect to internet,  or pretty well any other question that starts with "What is ..... " concerned with the internet and technology.    Gives you the run down on everything from "What is an add-on card" to "What is Frame Relay" ...  You can find it at  http://www.whatis.com/

Games Online
http://www.zone.com is a good site for playing games and having a chat at the same time. They have a wide range of games including cards and all the shoot-em up types. Backgammon is free to play and easy to install. The site name may change in the next few days, but this address should still work.

Call Drop outs
A number of users have recently been suffering from a series of call dropouts. We believe this is related to varying conditions in to the local phone lines. When this happens the quality of the call signal may be lowered and modems are unable to sustain the speeds that you can normally achieve (or even unable to connect successfully). There is a solution that has solved 95% of the problems we users have encountered. You need to control the maximum speed that your modem connects to us.
If you go to your control panel, click modems, select the relevant modem, click properties, click connection, then click advanced connection settings enter the following into the box that says "Extra settings".
If you have an external modem or your internal modem has a Rockwell chip set, enter
AT+MS=11,1
or you can try
AT+MS=V34

OR, if you have an internal modem that is a Win modem or Soft modem, enter
AT-V90=0

More information can be found at http://www.56k.com

Unknown phone/data calls to Diego Garcia
There appears to be a number of users Australia wide (all ISP's) suffering from some unknown phone/data calls to various parts of the world. The most common is to Diego Garcia.

What happens is that when you surf to certain web pages, usually adult related content, but not always, and offering Free streaming video or similar, a program is downloaded to your computer. When this file is automatically executed it creates a new dial-up connection to Diego Garcia, silently hangs up your modem and then places a new call to the overseas destination, all without you hearing or seeing anything to indicate this is happening. Often with some form of music playing on the web page to cover any quiet clicks your modem may make.

We are unable to offer any kind of barriers/filters from our side of things, but ask all users to be extremely careful as you may receive a rather large phone bill for the ISD calls.

Complaints to Telstra / Optus have not been successful so far. About the only way we know of to see if this may have happened to you is for you to check your dial up network settings, and make sure nothing new and unusual has been created.

You can check this by going through the following: My Computer / Dial Up Networking, check the different ISP icons by right clicking on each one, then select properties and check the phone numbers they are dialing. Connecting to Relax should be set to dial to 8624 8060

Members page
We have now updated the members page so that you can select the month you wish to view your hours online for, as well as added some graphs that give you an indication of our peak times. When is asks for your username, you need to enter the same name that you log on to us with.

WebMail
Just a note to people using our WebMail service. Please be sure that you empty your "sent message" box sometimes. If you dont it may fill up, and then you wont be able to recieve any email into your account.

MicroSoft Dial-Up Error codes
Here is a web page at Microsoft that gives a listing of those error codes that you sometimes receive while trying to dial in. http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q163/1/11.asp . This wont be of use to everyone, but thought it may be of interest to some and worth while printing out for future reference.