Frequently Asked Questions About Cruzio’s Email Upgrade

Q. What happened?
A. On May 22nd, 2018, Cruzio did a major upgrade of our email software. So there are new settings for some programs and a new Webmail interface. It’s a big improvement but could require some patience as you adapt to the new situation. We apologize for any inconvenience, and we think you’ll like the changes!

Q. What email addresses are affected? 
A. Email addresses ending in the following domain names are affected. Other addresses don’t have to make changes:
@cruzio.com
@baymoon.com
@calcentral.com
@cruziolatino.com
@ebold.com
@elgattito.com
@icogitate.com
@rattlebrain.com
@scshop.com
@skyhighway.com

Q. What’s the fastest way to get my email? 
A. Go to Cruzio Webmail. All you need is a login and password (and if you forget the password, you can retrieve one).

Q. I’m getting a broken link when I try to get to my email. What do I do?
A. Try turning your computer (or phone, or tablet) and your modem or router off, wait 30 seconds, and turn them on again. It might be that you’ve got old information lingering in your software and this will clear it out.

Q. Why is my mailbox so much smaller?
A. The new email system is removing way more spam. That means your main mailbox will have less email in it, and the Spam mailbox will have more.

Q. I am having trouble accessing my email in my usual way. What should I do?
A. To get to your email right now, go to Cruzio Webmail. It’s all set up already. You only need your login to get full access to your email.

Q. But I like my other email programs.
A. They will all work! To set up other ways of getting email, like Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and other apps on your phone or tablet, we have a full set of handy instructions here. It will only take a few minutes, but we know sometimes that’s even too long, so use Cruzio Webmail if you have any trouble or you are in a hurry.

Q. I already made the settings changes and my mail program still isn’t working!
A. If you have already updated your settings and you still can’t get your mail, even if a Cruzio tech walked you through it or did it for you, you probably just need to reboot your networking equipment. Turn your modem and router off, wait a few seconds, and turn them back on. This should fix the problem.

Q. Can I get more help?
A. We are ready to help you. We’ve moved over 7,000 mailboxes to the new system and we know there will be people needing assistance. So let us know what’s going on and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. We also have staff (and you know our staff are friendly and knowledgeable!) on hand from 10 am to 5 pm every weekday at our front desk. If you bring in your phone, laptop, tablet, or computer, we’ll be glad to set it up with you, no appointments needed. If 10 to 5 doesn’t work, let us know and we’ll work it out.

Q. What are the improvements?
A. You’ve got more storage for saved email (20GB).  Bigger messages are permitted (35MB). Better spam filtering. A better way to read email with your web browser (Cruzio Webmail). And on the back end, where you can’t see it, a more robust and redundant system. 

Q. What about privacy, security, net neutrality?
A. Cruzio has the same standards we always have. Your email isn’t harvested for marketing material. Your personal information isn’t collected for sale. That’s never going to change.

Q. Any danger that email was lost while Cruzio moved it?
A. No. We had a redundant system during the change. We’ve moved the mailboxes to a different server, but on our side, everything is there ready for you. You just have to point your email program to the new server, if you haven’t already.

Q. Is there a limit on the number of messages I can send?
A. To protect against spammers, our system limits each user to sending to 500 recipients in any 24 hour period. This is 500 recipients, not 500 messages. If you need to send more messages than that, we recommend using a full-featured mailing list service like MailChimp. Mailchimp is free for up to 2000 mailing list members and up to 12,000 messages per month. It is what we use for the Cruzio newsletter.

Cruzio Webmail

Q. How do I change the size of the font in Cruzio Webmail?
A.  Click ‘Settings’ in the menu bar and then ‘font settings’ in the left-hand pane. From here you can increase the base font size up to 16px.

Q. I’m trying Webmail. My “sent” folder is missing some or all of the email that used to be in it.  What’s up?
A. It’s likely that the name of that folder in Webmail is just different from the name of the folder in your other email program. Sometimes it’s as simple as “Sent” vs “sent.”

To find the other “sent” emails, look through the folders. You’ll probably see another folder in the list that contains that mail.

Then, to change the name in Cruzio Webmail to match your other email program:

1. Click “Settings” in Webmail.
2. Click “Preferences” on the left.
3. Click “Special Folders”.
4. Adjust the “Sent Items” drop down to match the sent folder you used before.
   

Q. My messages have weird time and date stamps on them. What should I do?
A. This usually happens if javacript isn’t available on your computer. It’s easy to set manually:

1. Click “Settings” in Webmail.
2. Click “Preferences” on the left.
3. Click “User Interface” on the center pane.
4. Adjust the time zone to reflect your location. Santa Cruz is -08:00GMT.

And if you set it manually, don’t forget that you’ll have to do that again if you take the device to a different time zone!

Q. How do I select multiple messages at once?
A.  If all of the messages you want to select are contiguous, you can click the first message, hold down the Shift key, and then click the last message. The first and last messages all messages in between are selected. If the messages are not contiguous, hold down the Ctrl key and then click each of the messages you want to select.

Q. How do I customize my spam settings?
A. The default settings will deliver spam to your Spam folder. You don’t need to do anything to get it started. If a spam message reaches your inbox, tag it as spam by selecting it and clicking the ‘Spam’ button on the menu bar. If you navigate to your spam folder and see any legitimate message sin there, select them and click ‘Not Spam’ in the menu bar.

Q. Can I white-list people I don’t want sent to spam?
A. To block or allow specific email addresses or domains, click ‘Settings’ in the menu bar and then ‘Spam Settings’ in the left-hand pane. You can add up to 1000 entries in each Allowed and Blocked list. Note: Domain names must be preceded by *@ (for example, *@domain.com), otherwise they will not work.

Q. How do I empty my email trash folder?
A.  Click the Trash folder in the left-hand pane, select all messages and click ‘Delete’ in the menu bar. If you do nothing, anything in your Trash folder will be deleted automatically after 7 days.

Accounts and Billing

Q. I notice you are charging for mailboxes that used to be free. My family/business has been using multiple email addresses for years and can’t afford to start paying for all of them. What can I do?
A. The first step is to clean out any email addresses you aren’t using. For the rest, although we’re raising the price, each mailbox is only $60 per year, so consider whether it may be worth the cost. There are no contracts required, you can cancel any time. If that doesn’t make sense, we have many low-cost options which can help, including free email forwarding. Please contact us, we’ll work it out!

Q. I didn’t even know I had these mailboxes. Can you tell me what’s in them?
A. We won’t read your email but we’ll help you do it: Cruzio can reset your passwords if you contact us and provide proper identification.

Q. I want to close a mailbox. What happens to all the mail?
A. Before you close an email address, you’ll need to make sure you’ve downloaded any data you want to keep to your computer or other device. Cruzio will keep the email for 21 days past the date the service is closed, so you will have a last chance to restore data if there’s something you have missed.

Q. I have to download all my email? How do I do that?
A. The download happens on the customer side, so Cruzio can’t do it for you. But we do have instructions and advice for you, and the process should be pretty easy. If it’s a complicated case, we’re happy to recommend a consultant. And remember, if it’s taking you a while to figure it out, the cost to keep a mailbox is only $5 per month.

Q. I use the email address as a login for services that are important to me like Facebook and my bank. Or people I’ve lost touch with have that address and might try to contact me someday. What should I do?
A. We kept the per-mailbox cost low so that you can keep an email address or transition from it very slowly. We’re also providing forwarding so that email to one of your addresses can be received in another mailbox — free of charge. Contact us for advice if you need it!

Q. I liked the old interface. I’m used to it. Why did you change?
A. Technology moves forward pretty relentlessly, as everyone working at Cruzio knows. There are just a lot of issues that older email clients don’t handle well. We think you’ll really like the new interface.

Q. New email interface! I’m excited! But does that mean I need to change the settings in my email readers?
A. Yes, you’ll need to change them on all the devices you use to send and receive email. Instructions are here. The only way to access your email without modifying your settings is to use your web browser to access Cruzio Webmail.

Q. I have a million questions.
A. We’re happy to answer them. If you ask a good one we’ll add it to this FAQ! Contact us.

Now that so much of the world runs on the internet, we need to make sure the rules are working for everyone.

When companies are as big, powerful, and well-funded as the cable and phone corporations, it’s hard to refuse them anything.

But there’s good news: as the federal government succumbs to lobbying pressure, some cities are standing up and saying “no.”

Santa Cruz can be one of those cities.

If local governments can’t overrule federal regulations, we can at least make sure that our public dollars don’t support the loss of an open internet. Cities like Santa Cruz, under the leadership of Mayor David Terrazas, are leaning towards a meaningful commitment to only do business with ISPs who are net neutral. (More about the pledge here.) Mayor Terrazas has signed the pledge (yay!).

The Santa Cruz City Council today approved a declaration supporting Net Neutrality in general terms. We hope the Council will take the next step and codify the pledge signed by our mayor.

We hope that other entities will take the pledge, too. When you pay for internet service, you should be the one who decides what you can watch, listen to, or read. Information services are not a good place to put a highest-bidder or corporate-crony filter. All ISPs are currently net neutral, since the change has not yet been implemented. Let’s give all ISPs a reason to stay that way.

Good step forward! Let’s support net neutrality.

So the internet works for all of us.

—Peggy Dolgenos
President, Cruzio Internet

Mayors David Terrazas and Lowell Hurst and County Supervisor Zach Friend are strong supporters of Net Neutrality

These Mayors Support Net Neutrality

Plus a County Supervisor…

There’s a chance to save Net Neutrality. Act now.

We know there’s a lot going on. But this is important. It affects the public’s ability to access and publish information.

What’s at Stake

Prospects for a neutral, open, and fair internet have taken a bad turn. In December 2017, the FCC changed its ruling and lifted the requirement for ISPs to be Net Neutral  — which means that ISPs can choose what to speed up or slow down on the internet.

How long do you usually wait for a website to load before you click away? The effect could be devastating for media competition and especially for smaller companies that can’t afford to pay.

Of course, the ISP’s customers have already paid for internet. We think ISPs should not be charging both the customer (you) and the vendor (Netflix, or YouTube, or little startup company X).

Cruzio’s view is, if you’re paying for a connection, you should get to watch whatever you choose.

Where We’re At

So back to the beginning of this blog. There’s a chance to save Net Neutrality if we really try.

The FCC’s decision was in December, but it takes a while for such things to be official (“entered into the Federal Register”). That just happened February 22nd.

Once recorded, the Senate can rescind the regulation if they vote to do so within 60 days.

50 senators have already indicated they’d vote to overturn the recent decision. We just need one more senator.

Our California senators are already on board. And California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra has joined 22 other attorneys general to sue the FCC and prevent the change. So in general California is already pro-Net Neutrality, though certainly they’d all appreciate a “thanks!”.

The most effective action: if you know someone in a state with Republican senators, contact your friend and get them to give their senators a nudge! Net Neutrality is very popular with the general public. Reminding senators of that has worked well in the past.

We need just one more senator.

By the way, the NRA awarded a rifle to Trump administration’s FCC Chair Ajit Pai for his work killing Net Neutrality. The award came just about a week after the Parkland shooting.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Cruzio will soon upgrade our email services. Heads up: Cruzio is raising the monthly price of our service to $5 per mailbox in order to make the change. For people who have previously had free email attached to another service, this can represent a noticeable jump in cost.

(Note: This doesn’t apply to custom domain name email service, just to our core address space ending in @cruzio.com, @baymoon.com, @rattlebrain.com, @calcentral.com, @scshop.com, @elgatito.com, @ebold.com, @skyhighway.com, @cruziolatino.com, and @icogitate.com.)

Here’s an explanation of what we’re doing and why. For tips on how to be prepared and keep costs low, check our FAQ. For a smooth change down the line, we recommend changing settings now — here’s the info you’ll need.

Our first goal is to clear out unused mailboxes before we move to a new platform. We know because of the long-time low cost, many people have addresses they don’t use. The first step if you’re in that boat is to remove unwanted mailboxes. Please contact us to get that done, and we’ll be happy to help with issues like recovering forgotten passwords, forwarding (which we’re providing free of charge), and saving old messages.

Once our mailbox count has stabilized (we expect there will be many fewer of them), Cruzio will shift to the newer interface. Watch this space for announcements of new features in the coming months.

Why the Change

The simple answer is that maintaining and supporting a non-ad-based email service is quite expensive.  Sending and receiving messages might seem simple but the fact of the matter is that maintaining a good email service 24/7/365 is a lot of work, and email is what our customers call or write us about most. Adding better spam protection and a better user interface, which we feel is necessary, adds to the cost and we’ll be charged for those improvements by a third party on a per-mailbox per-month basis.

Then there’s the fact that Cruzio does not sell our customer information, surround your emails with ads, or otherwise subsidize the service as do free email providers such as Yahoo! or Gmail. The bottom line is that those services are free because the companies providing them want as many users as possible in order to monetize their personal data.

Cruzio is different. We work hard to protect our members’ privacy. We strongly believe it makes a difference to have an alternative to big nationwide ISPs — we stand out by offering fast, reliable internet services while being good members of the community and meeting a high bar for service and integrity.

To everyone who doesn’t like the increase in mailbox prices, Cruzio doesn’t like it either. We held off as long as we could. The current open source software we put together — and held together for many years — just isn’t providing the kind of user experience our customers need. We have to provide a better solution, and we’re going to do just that. The new email will have better spam protection, bigger mailboxes, and a much better user experience. Unfortunately, that’s expensive and we absolutely refuse to offset expenses by selling users’ personal information and browsing data or cutting off phone support as other companies do.

Understanding that some of our customers value free service over privacy and customer care and will elect to move to a different service, perhaps a free service, we have given months of notice to make sure people have time to find and transition to a new provider.

But if you’re inclined to stay, we’ll work to keep your business, so try talking with us first!

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions, we’re always happy to help answer them. Our staff is on hand to assist in any way possible. We value you as customers and as neighbors.

And most of all, thank you for your continued support of local, Net Neutral internet.

Need more information? Check out our Email Upgrade FAQ.

There’s been bad news lately about the internet. As expected after last year’s election, the FCC has rescinded its Net Neutrality rules.

The arguments against Net Neutrality are, frankly, disingenuous. They range from the idea that companies won’t invest without guaranteed results (what about every other industry?) to assurances that consumers don’t really need protection and will barely notice any difference: “Nothing to see here, folks.”

Cruzio disagrees. We’re skeptical that those arguments are simply political cover for allowing the biggest ISPs to make a lot more money by making the internet less open and free. The tragedy of the commons.

There are plenty of places to read arguments for Net Neutrality, like these at Ars Technica and from the ACLU. And Cruzio has been sounding the alarm for some time. We’re happy to discuss it at length, from the point of view of an ISP — it’s often argued that ISPs are unilaterally in favor of dropping the rule. But that’s not true.

Cruzio tried very hard to preserve the Net Neutrality rule. We worked with the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF).  We joined other independent ISPs in a letter to the FCC defending it. Ajit Pai kept claiming that “ISPs” needed the rule removed. We’re an ISP. “Nope, not us, no,” we protested. Deaf ears.

But now that we’ve gotten outvoted at the FCC, what can we do next?

It isn’t over.

Next steps:

First: Congress can, by a simple majority vote, review and reverse a federal regulation if it acts within 60 days of the rule’s publication. This would be a simple fix. Chuck Schumer, the Minority Leader, has promised to bring this to the Senate floor. Net Neutrality polls extremely well. If Congress voted with popular opinion this could happen quickly. But lobbying money is a strong counter-incentive to public interest, and large ISPs and their parent companies are some of the top donors in Washington (check the charts below, from OpenSecrets.org).  Even supportive representatives will have a strong incentive to lose the fight. So this is the area where public support is important right now — we have to speak louder than money. Action steps are right here.

Second: States are looking at imposing their own regulations. A state like California, with its economic clout, can strongly influence the market. We see that in other industries. For example, California air quality regulations have caused car manufacturers to meet higher standards than what’s federally required. Perhaps the same could go for Net Neutrality. Or at least we’d enjoy it in our state. We support State Senator Scott Weiner’s bill for Net Neutrality in California.

Third: Lawsuits. There is good evidence that the FCC did not do its required due diligence in accepting public input: it appears that millions of “public comments” were entered by hackers, many of them from, of course, Russia. With such a muddled data set, how can the Commission say it has had a clear view on public opinion? The claim is also being made that the FCC did not make a fact-based study to back up its decision, which has merit but seems harder to prove.

Fourth: the most basic part of the discussion, for us, is that Cruzio is committed to Net Neutral practices and we’re not going to change that. To almost quote Arlo Guthrie, “You can get anything you want, at Cruzio’s restaurant ISP.”

By the way, we’ve had some questions from our customers about Net Neutrality.

Here are some of the questions, and our best answers right now:

Q: Can people avoid paying for content by using a VPN?

A: It doesn’t seem like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) would help. Corporate ISPs which charge more for data from “out of network” sources would surely just classify all VPN traffic as “outside of network.”

Q: What about upstream providers? Will they charge more?

A: This question recognizes that the internet is a network, and that data travels not just inside one ISP, but is handed off from one company to another. But there is a difference between the ISP who serves individual customers and “NSPs,” or network service providers. Right now, the “backbone” of the internet is still fairly competitive. ISPs like Cruzio can choose from a number of NSPs. We should keep an eye out for over-consolidation of the internet backbone, but this is less of an immediate issue so far as we can see. If Cruzio found that an upstream provider violated Net Neutrality, we’d stop sending traffic through that company.

Q: Are Cruzio’s upstream providers fighting for Net Neutrality?

A: Many of our fellow ISPs, including a company called Sonic from which we rent circuits, are active in the pro-Net Neutrality cause. But NSPs aren’t generally involved in the discussion — see above.

It’s time to take action.

On December 14th, the FCC will vote on rolling back Net Neutrality rules. The change would hand a huge amount of control over the internet to large corporations.

Before that happens — and in the hopes that it might not — let’s sign petitions, call senators, email the FCC. We won this fight last time because a lot of people raised their voices.

The following instructions are from social media. We’ve tested them at Cruzio and they’re simple to do. Please feel free to copy and paste the steps below!

John Oliver has made it easy to voice your concern re: net neutrality. Here are the steps:
1. Go to gofccyourself.com
(the shortcut John Oliver made to the hard-to-find FCC comment page)
2. Click on the 17-108 link (Restoring Internet Freedom)
3. Click on “+Express”
4. Be sure to hit “ENTER” after you put in your name & info so it registers.
5. In the comment section write, for example, “I strongly support net neutrality backed by Title 2 oversight of ISPs.”
6. Click to submit, done. – Make sure you hit submit at the end!

Click here for more links to pro-Net Neutrality action. It’s easy and fast to make your opinion known. And if you’re a Cruzio customer, thank you. By supporting a competitive independent ISP you’re supporting Net Neutrality, too.

By now, most people know what Net Neutrality means (if you don’t, here’s a brief video explanation).

Basically, losing the requirement for Net Neutrality puts the decision of what you can see on the internet into the hands of internet service providers, or ISPs. Cruzio’s an ISP, but we don’t think we should decide what you see — we are staunchly Net Neutral and will continue to be even if the rules are revoked. Large corporate ISPs feel differently (and, despite rules,  act differently) and have spent a lot of lobbying money fighting Net Neutrality for many years.

When former Verizon lawyer  Ajit Pai became FCC chair under the Trump administration, he immediately began the move to strip Net Neutrality rules. That’s the issue in the December 14th vote.

Up next, corporate ISPs are pushing to prevent states from setting their own Net Neutrality rules.

Don’t let the ever-increasing consolidation of corporate internet companies force a consolidation of media sources, too. Protect the opportunity for startups to flourish — as companies like Google, Reddit, Tinder, Wikipedia and so many others have done not so long ago. We’re still at the beginning of the internet. We have so much more to create.

Maybe you’ve used the same password for a dozen years: your dog’s name, or a bunch of letters you put together at some point and just remember now. Hopefully your password of choice is not “password” or “123456”, two of the still-most-popular passwords in the USA.

But even with an unusual password, if it’s A) old and/or B) used for lots of different sites, it’s probably time for a change.

A lot of password-holding services—like Yahoo, or Target, or many more—have been hacked, and criminals know they can often succeed by trying the same login and password combinations on other sites: for example, they’ll try using your Yahoo login at every banking site, hoping to find your account.

Wondering if your information has been compromised? Haveibeenpwned.com looks to see if your password or other personally identifying information has been gathered in one of the many hacking incidents over the years. “Pwned,” by the way, is short for being “perfectly owned” —gamer lingo for someone completely getting the better of you.

When info is stolen, it goes out onto the so-called Dark Web for sale. Someone might want to buy your name, address and birthdate—and passwords, social security numbers and answers to security questions (like “what was your first car?”) are worth even more. Haveibeenpwned.com works by checking for your name or login on the Dark Web and telling you whether your information has been released.

If you see you’ve been compromised, think of the other places you may have used that same login and password, and change your passwords!

Or, just change your passwords anyway. It’s time, right?

More on how to choose a password (this is a fun idea) and how to remember passwords here.

Recently, the US Congress repealed important internet privacy protections. The repeal allows internet providers to gather and sell personal data — like location and browsing histories — without the user’s permission.

People have been asking Cruzio if we sell personal data.

The answer: No. Cruzio and Santa Cruz Fiber do not use or share your data for any purpose other than carrying out the internet service we’re providing you. And we don’t sell your data at all. Never have, never will. It’s that simple.

Whether or not it’s illegal, Cruzio and Santa Cruz Fiber believe it’s unethical to collect and sell your personal data without your permission.

Cruzio’s owners and staff are all deeply committed to keeping your personal information private and secure at every level of our company.

If you are concerned about privacy on the Internet, we urge you to take action. Let your representatives know that it is a concern. Support the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU.

The next big issue on the internet front may be Net Neutrality.

Cruzio and Santa Cruz Fiber practice Net Neutrality — we can get pretty passionate about it, just like privacy. Keep your eye on this issue too. We’ll be sharing updates on these issues in our newsletter, blog and on social media.

(Note: let your elected representatives know what you think about internet rules! To find contact information for all your representatives, we recommend the Needful News Network. If you enter your full address, you’ll get a list of all elected officials who serve you. )