[Iinet-newsletter] July 2003 Newsletter for iinet.com

Thu Jul 24 17:29:31 PDT 2003

Welcome to the July 2003 Newsletter for Infinity Internet.

We hope that you find our articles interesting and helpful.

Features
     New CD!
     Easy Pay - A Great New Way to Pay!
     Receipt Notification - Now Available!
     Customer Service Survey - Tell us how we are doing!
     Spam Filtering!
     Network Corner - Making Changes in Scheduling to Meet Your Needs!

In Every Issue
     Save More Dough
     -	Spread The Word With Our Referral Program
     What To Do Prior To Calling Client Services For Technical Support
     Tech Tip of the Month
     -	Sending Email
     Help Pages
     -  Take A Look & Let Us Know What You Think!
     Internet Smarts
     -	Shutdown
     -	Update Your Modem Driver

The Basics
     Dialup List
     Contact Us
     Cancel Subscription

We Have A New CD!

Infinity Internet has just a released a new CD for our customers! It contains a simple setup utility so that your system can be configured to access the Internet without calling into our tech support department. It also contains a small library of Internet related shareware and freeware applications for easier use. Also you can access a number of links that lead to useful online resources such as our live chat and search sections. Last, but definitely not least, we have our help site included on the CD in an easy to use format. If this sounds useful to you please contact our Client Services department at support at iinet.com so we can mail one out to you for free!  

Please also feel free to contact us about any other questions or suggestions you may have about our new CD.

Introducing Easy Pay!

We have a new way to accept payments known as Easy Pay.  This payment method deducts your service charges directly from your checking account.  Easy Pay has a lot of advantages. It's convenient - your bill will be paid automatically without having to fuss with checks, stamps, and envelopes. It's very secure - you no longer need to worry about lost checks.   Signing up is easy too!  Just visit http://www.iinet.com/account/eft.php to fill out the enrollment form, and then send it in to us with a voided check.  Look on our website for more details!

Receipt Notification Now Available!

You'll be happy to know that as of July 1st you'll automatically receive an email message from us when we process your payment.  You won't have to wait for next month's invoice to see whether we received your payment.  This is one of the benefits of the billing software we're now using.  In the near future we'll be implementing several other features that clients have requested.  Several of these features are listed below.

As of July 1st, you'll receive a copy of your monthly invoice via email.  Invoices will come from "Infinity Internet".  This does not represent a change in ownership.  We've been the same company since May 1st 2002 but operating under several of our original names including Pacifier, Northwest Link, TST Onramp, and ProAxis Communications.  Using multiple names has caused confusion and we are doing our best to reduce confusion.

Your email address is not changing and will NOT change (unless you specifically request it be changed).

If you call Client Services, they will ask for your email address.  Please give them your entire email address, including the "@" sign and the domain (iinet.com, pacifier.com, nwlink.com, proaxis.com, tstonramp.com, etc.).

On 8/1/2003 we will be adding an enhanced billing feature that will provide more detail on your invoice.  In addition to the description of the service rate, we will include more account details.  Please note, your monthly total will not change.  

To see a sample invoice, please go to:
http://www.iinet.com/demo/

Thank you for your attention and business,

Infinity Internet Client Services
feedback at iinet.com

Customer Service Survey

Thank you for using Infinity Internet where we strive for continuous improvement.  With all the recent enhancements, we would like to ask you to complete a short, 7 question, survey about how we are doing. The survey is available at:
http://tscapps-srv00.ptldor0.pacifier.net/survey/public/survey.php?name=howarewedoing and will be available through the month of August.

Spam Filtering

We are pleased to announce that we have recently installed two new spam (junk mail) filters. The first filter is called Spam Assassin, which scans the e-mail just before it is sent to you. It maintains a scoring system for various content in the messages that it is scanning. If the software records too many points or hits the message will be discarded and not delivered to your mailbox.

The second filter allows you to setup different criteria such as certain types of message attachments, viruses for example typically are specific file types, which the filter will detect and try to prevent from getting to your mail box. We have installed several different filtering rules as examples for you to use.

Both of these filters are off by default for all of our accounts. If you would like to enable mail filtering you can activate it at http://console.iinet.com

Network Corner

Well, it looks like we've almost gotten all the network changes completed and are starting to go into a more Maintenance mode approach to network management.  We have changed our scheduled downtimes to Saturday night/ Sunday morning schedule.  Scheduled downtimes are now in a window from 11 PM Saturday Night to 5 AM Sunday morning.  Most downtimes will be significantly shorter but will happen within this window.  All of them are announced on our outage board at http://www.iinet.com/bulletins/report.php

Over the next few weeks we will be having spot outages of 10 minutes or less during these times as we upgrade the Operating System (IOS) in our routers to fix issues and implement new features.  We will make sure and post these to the bulletin section above.

Save More Dough 

Spread The Word With Our Referral Plan!

And reap the benefits with our Friends and Family referral plan! Most of us already tell others who our Internet provider is, so why not get some credit for it?  With our Friends and Family Referral Program you can get credit on your account for referring people that sign up for our services.   So tell the people you know and see the savings! 
Take at a look at http://www.iinet.com/services/referral for more details! 

For more information, please contact one of our Client Services Specialists at: 

·	360-735-3700 or 503-808-8000 or 1-800-689-4303 
·	billing at iinet.com 

What To Do Prior to Calling Client Services For Technical Support

In order for us to be able to better help you with our Technical Support, please be sure to do a couple of things that will help us get your issue resolved.  These are:

1.	Please be in front of your computer with it turned on.  If you have more than one phone line in the house, please be sure you are calling in on the one NOT in use by your computer.

2.	Also, if you have your account number with us handy, that would be very helpful.  This number is located in the upper right hand corner of your invoice.

3.	If you are getting an error message, please have it either up on your screen or written down when you call so you can read it to the technician.  Many error messages are very similar and having the exact message is often times important.

These steps will help us trouble shoot any difficulties you're having to a large extent.

Tech Tip of the Month  - Sending Email

Last month I gave some suggestions on how to make receiving email more reliable. This week I'm going to go into detail on how to improve your ability to send email. Sending email in some ways works in a very similar manner to the way that receiving email works. You usually use the same program to send as you do to receive, and you can run into some of the same issues with both of them. As with receiving email, giving our Client Services department a call if you run into difficulties is a good idea, as it will usually get your issue resolved right away. However, by checking a few simple things your can help resolve the issue much more quickly. 

The first thing you want to check for is details. Did you get an immediate error message when you tried to send out the email? Did you get a bounce back message just a couple minutes later saying that the message didn't go through, or did you not receive it till a day or more had passed? Did the message appear to send correctly, but then seem to vanish without any sort of error or arriving at its destination? All these questions help narrow down where the issue is occurring. If you get an immediate error message that comes up as soon as you try to send, that usually means there is a connection difficulty between your computer and the server you trying to send to. That error could mean that the server is currently down, it can also mean that your connection to the server has timed out, or even that the server name isn't listed properly in your settings. 

If you get a bounce back message this frequently points to an issue with the message itself, or one of the servers that's handling the message. It's possible the email address you specified may not exist at the destination your sending it to possibly because of an error on that server, or due to a mistyped email address, it could also mean that the mail server that the email account is on could be experiencing an outage. If you examine the bounce back message for an address to send a report to you can often use that to figure out what server or servers the issue is occurring on. When you get no bounce back message but your recipient didn't receive the email that almost always means that the email arrived at the incorrect email address.

Now that you have some idea of what the cause of issue is I can give you some simple solutions to try and resolve the issue. One of the simplest things to do is to make sure that you are sending your email to the correct address. Another thing to check on is the bulletins section of our website (http://www.iinet.com/bulletins/report.php) to make sure there are no known outages. While on the site you're in a great position to make sure the settings in your email program match the ones in our help section. Once you have done that you may want to check and see if you are able to send email out to anyone else. That helps you see if it's an issue with your ability to send any email or with just sending to a specific person. You may also want to try sending email via our web mail utility. Finally, if nothing else seems to help you may want to consider switching to a newer version of your email program or going with an entirely different one.

If none of this helps resolve your issue I would recommend contacting us. This can be done a number of ways; one of the best ways is via phone at 1-800-689-4303, that allows for fast trouble shooting. If that doesn't work for you though we can also be reached by chat from the http://www.iinet.com home page. Also if you are able to contact us via email we can be emailed at support at iinet.com. 

Help Pages - Take A Look & Let Us Know What You Think!

We are happy to announce that our new Help Site is running.

The new site can be viewed at: http://help.iinet.com. 

The new help site is set up in a manner that is intended to provide you with quick access to any question you might have.  If you are unable to find the information you are searching for we would like to hear from you.  If you feel that you have information to contribute to the site, that is also something we would enjoy hearing about.  Questions, comments and suggestions are all welcome.  

We look forward to your feedback on the site.  To help us gather feedback, feel free to fill out a survey at the bottom of the first page of the site.  Alternatively, you can email your ideas to us at: support at iinet.com. 

Internet Smarts 

Shutdown

If you are having any difficulties getting a connection to us, we would suggest doing a full shutdown and restart of your system. This usually solves a lot of the issues that can give you connection difficulties. On Windows systems, this can be done by going to the start menu and selecting the shutdown option. Then, select shutdown from the list of available options and click the "OK" button. On a Macintosh, you will want to go to the special menu at the top of your screen and then select the shutdown option. This simple step can help your connection ability a lot more then you may think. 

Update Your Modem Driver

One other thing that we can suggest that can have large effect on your ability to successfully connect to us is your modem driver. We cannot recommend enough making sure you have the most up-to-date drivers for your modem. You can usually find what modem drivers are the latest for your system by going to one of the following sites that provide links to many different modem manufacturer's sites.

	http://www.drivershq.com/Main.asp 
	http://www.download.com 
	http://www.driverguide.com

Another place you check for information about your modem drivers is either the modem manufacturer or in some circumstances, your computer manufacturer. Even if your computer is brand new occasionally new drivers are available for the modem. It's usually a good idea to check just to be sure. 

If you have any questions regarding these suggestions, please feel free to give us a call at 1-800-689-4303. Our technical support team is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Dialup List

All of our dialup numbers are listed at: http://www.iinet.com/dialup/

Contact Us

We are available to assist you with your needs at any time of the day or night. 

Voice: 
	360-735-3700 or 803-808-8000 or 1-800-689-4303

Via e-mail: 
	For Technical Support: support at iinet.com 

	For Billing Support: account at iinet.com

	To Signup for a new account: sales at iinet.com

Via Mail:
	Infinity Internet
	PO Box 872890
	Vancouver, WA
	98687-2890

Via Fax:

	Client Services:  360-816-9017
	Administrative:  360-254-3898

Cancel Subscription

While we hope you like hearing what we are doing we completely understand if you do not want to hear from us each month. You can change this yourself by going to the following URL. 

http://console.pacifier.com/mailman/listinfo/iinet-newsletter 

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