Greetings and Salutations -

Thank you all so much for your patience these past few weeks while we've dealt with the spam situation. Having the anti-spam software shut down at the end of April was quite a challenge. Our BellaOnline server even froze up on the first day I went on vacation, which seems to be related to the deluge of spam it was dealing with. Somehow the server always knows when I am going on vacation :). Luckily we got that resolved pretty quickly.

I have been doing substantial tweaking to the server these past weeks and I think it's finally having an impact. Some of these changes took a few days to "roll out" and get into the system. This afternoon I'm now seeing a reduction in the spam.

I've also been making a renewed effort to talk with the various mail companies like gmail and hotmail and so on about not blocking our newsletters. I think the only one that is giving us serious trouble right now is hotmail. I've once again asked them to please remove that block. All of our newsletters are requested by end users and we do our best to keep automated robots for signing up for them.

Please continue to leave emails on your lists which are bouncing due to "you are a spammer" types of blocks. It's fine to unsubscribe someone where the message actually says they're an invalid user. But if the error message is saying they are blocking BellaOnline for being a spammer, please continue to ignore those. The aim of course is to get the situation resolved so those users can start to get their newsletters again.

Once I get all the various email issues more settled, I'll move on to finalizing the big task of getting our site secure and mobile-friendly. I've been testing these changes for quite a while now on my other sites to make sure I have a handle on everything before I do it to BellaOnline. We haven't changed BellaOnline's look and feel in probably 15 years or so, so I'm taking it slow. But clearly it has to be done :).

Ask with any questions!

Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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