November

BLOCKED!

As many of you have no doubt noticed, SORBS is blocking riseup.net email and mailing lists. How does it do this? SORBS is a Real Time Blocklist (or RBL) used by many email providers to block mail from suspected spammers.

The seemingly good SORBS is actually an evil genius in disguise. SORBS began blocking thousands of customers of our upstream provider as collective punishment to get the upstream provider to shut down a spammer. The upstream provider has fixed the problem, but now SORBS refuses to respond to any of our queries to end the block.

Our crack team of scientists is hard at work to develop a temporary technical work around until we can get permanently removed from SORBS. The larger issue is that the internet is becoming a very scary place, particularly for small providers. Now that almost all email is spam, irresponsible anti-spam services like SORBS are taking desperate measures to curb spam, measures which often do more harm than good.

We will let you know as soon as the SORBS email embargo has been lifted.

RISEUP.NET, NEW AND IMPROVED

A few weeks ago, two of our geeks emerged from the underground riseup bunker/laboratory to squint at the misty morning sky. “Victory!” they cried, and collapsed in a deep sleep.

As you may have noticed, the old riseup.net email system was bursting at the seams. Email has been molasses for a long time. At one point, the storage capacity reached 99.999% full.

Deprived of sunlight, healthy food, their friends and loves, the geeks labored day and night in an undisclosed location. Their secret mission: build a new riseup.net, one that is better, faster, indestructible, with the ability to scale infinitely!

Well, we are still working on the indestructible part, but we are now using the new system and have finally ironed out most of the hiccups. Thank you for your patience during our awkward transition. When it grows up, the new riseup.net will be worth the wait!

NEW ACCOUNTS!

After a long moratorium, we are finally accepting applications for new email accounts. One of the superpowers of the new riseup.net email system is that we have doubled capacity and can easily double it again.

Even better, you can now bypass our request process. If someone gets two invite codes (each from a different riseup.net user), they can create an account immediately without waiting for approval. Go to https://user.riseup.net to create an invite code.

DONATE WHILE YOU STILL CAN

Will world capitalism collapse tomorrow? We don’t know. But it might. Just in case it does, you should take this opportunity to donate to riseup.net.

Perhaps we have not been clear: our services are not free. We are a movement organization, not a charity. We exist because there is a need for non-corporate and private communication. But we have a fatal vulnerability: unless you contribute for the services you use, we will quickly vanish into nothingness. Save us from the void!

Make sure the services you count on continue to improve by contributing as generously as you can. The money you donate goes directly to serving you and many others around the globe.

See http://riseup.net/donate for information on how to donate.

In solidarity, The Riseup Collective