Greetings and Salutations -

It seems we had an issue with an editor's email password being guessed by spammers. The password was six letters, which a spammer can get through fairly quickly. That meant a slew of porn messages were being sent out "from" that editor to sites like Yahoo and AOL.

Those sites, as you might guess, then blocked our regular newsletters from getting through.

We've changed that editor's password. If your own password is short and letter-only, give thought to making it a little more complicated. You can change your mail password in the mail interface. You can also change it in the main admin interface. If you change it in the main admin interface it will automatically update your admin logon and your member logon to match. Either way, please make sure your passwords are long and a bit convoluted. That helps ensure we all stay safe.

I just spent a number of hours carefully deleting out the spam from our mail queues so that I removed the bad messages without touching all our legitimate messages. So that good mail should now be flowing through properly again.

Over the next few days you may continue to get "mail blocked" messages from places like AOL and Yahoo. Just ignore / delete those messages. I am working with them to get the blocks released. Please don't unsubscribe those users. The users still want your newsletters. They'll start receiving them again once we get this issue resolved.

If you ever get "bouncebacks" from spam that seems to be sent in your name, please let me know about it. In some cases it's spoofed mail which is going from completely unknown servers in Russia or China. We can't fix those, of course :). But it's good to investigate just in case someone has actually hacked into your email address here on BellaOnline. If that's the case we want to immediately change your password and then block them from trying again.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Sincerely,

Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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