With 2005 all but on the books, we are looking forward to successful 2006. We also want to wish you all the greatest success in carrying out your New Years resolutions.

2006 is kind of a special year to us at Riverside. March 1, 1996 we officially opened for business, so, on March 1, we will be marking our 10th anniversary of offering Internet Service.

Riverside Internet is very happy to announce that we have made some important structural changes in the networking that is required to offer Internet Access.

Just as many of you have moved away from SBC as your telephone service provider, we too, have moved away from SBC as our primary networking provider. You probably changed because the alternative provider is much more user friendly, offers a larger variety of services, uses newer equipment, and doesn't mess up your bill taking several months to fix it. That pretty much sums up the reasons that we, too, started using a different provider than SBC.

There are some subtle differences in the new servers that we are using. Because of those differences and as always is the case when changes such as this are made, some will notice absolutely nothing, a large percentage will see a great improvement, and a small percentage will actually think that the new servers are worse . Which category you each fit in is largely dependent on the same conditions that have always determined the quality of your internet connection. If you were enjoying a decent, in the mid to upper 40's or even low 50's, connection prior our changover, you more than likely will see a great improvement. If your connection was lower, say in the 30's, you might not notice too much of a change. If you were only connecting in the mid 20's it is possible that you might not connect as well.

For those of you that are not connecting as well, we can help. We have alternate dial-in phone numbers that many times will make a difference. Call us if you are experiencing connection problems and if we cannot make the situation better, we will probably ask you to bring your computer to our shop. We are committed to making sure that your online experience is as good as it can be given the condition of your phone lines.

Riversides new servers supports v.44 compression. What this means is that the transfered data is compressed more efficiently resulting in an average of 25-50% greater throughput. The v.44, coupled with the new Riverside Accelerator results in a greatly improved service offering. It is important to note that v.44 works on any connection as long as your modem has the v.44 capability. So, even if you are only connecting in the mid 20k's you will still get some benefits of the compression.

We are often asked "who offers classes in computers locally". We, of course always tell people about NC RESA and Baker College, but, most people are really looking for something that just teaches them how to use their email or scan some pictures and send them in their email. We've found that the courses at this site http://courses.help.com/ can fill these needs quite well. Of course they will also offer many paid courses that go deeper than the freebies.

They also have forums that deal with Operating systems, Software, Hardware, Electronics, plus many other technology topics. You may have to become a member of CNET, but that is also free and quite useful.

George from Newaygo asks: Sometime back, I had you disable spam filtering on my email account because it was causing me some problems. I use my own spam filtering software but with amount of spam my email account recieves I am starting to have problems with my mailbox getting full if I don't check my email everyday.

Riverside Tech: Spam is a very challenging issue these days. It is very much a cat-n-mouse game. We are constantly changing and adding new rulesets to detect spam in our systems. Spammers try all sorts of nasty tricks to disguise there spam email. For instance, if we add a spam rule the trips on an email that contains the phrase "FREE VIAGRA" a month later they start sending email that offers "FREE V1AGRA". Notice that the replace the letter I with the number 1. While humans can easily tell the difference between junk spam email, it is a little harder for computers.

But we have one of best spam filters on the market. Our system currently blocks over 2.6 million spams a week to our 1500+ email users. We even have one customer that would receive over 3000 spam emails per day, if not for our spam filter. (Hi John ;o) ) Where many systems block email if one rule is broken, we have a system that uses thousands of rulesets, so that email can break a few rules and still pass through. Only emails the break many rules and have a score higher than our threashold get blocked. Our system also uses a bayesean statistical spam classifier so that as spam changes our system self-learns to change with it.

Now for those of you that have problems with our spam filter, we can whitelist specific problem email address or set a custom score on your email account so that spam filtering on you email account is less strict. If ever you have problems like this just call us or email us and we can figure out the best solution for you.

Many also ask us is there anything that can be done to reduce spam further, well the next version of Outlook Express should have a built in spam filter, but if you don't want to wait, the Thunderbird email program from Mozilla (The same people that make the Firefox web browser) is one of the best email programs on the market and has built in spam filtering. Personal spam filters tend to be a little more accurate because that can be tailored to an individual users exact definition of spam.


Send us your technical questions throughout the month. Each month we will answer, in detail, the one that we consider the best question here in the newsletter. We will award the person that asks that question one month of free Internet Access. E-mail your questions to newsletter@riverview.net

If you have comments or topics that you would like addressed in our newsletter just email us at newsletter@riverview.net