Hello,

Recently, Google announced they would be discontinuing the G Suite legacy free edition, pushing people to upgrade to a paid Google Workspace subscription. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in a serious backlash from many users, and Google had to back down a bit. They now allow people who use the G Suite legacy free edition for non-commercial purposes to opt out of the transition to Google Workspace. We have more on this topic in our blog:

Migrating Email From Google Workspace/G Suite Legacy/Gmail to Your Own Account

In any case, the whole situation forced many people to start looking for an alternative solution. This is where eHosted comes in. We have always had a reliable and secure mail service that offers plenty of disk space, which makes switching from Gmail (or any other IMAP mail provider for that matter) to ICDSoft a great option. And you can now do this directly from your Control Panel with our new "Copy mailbox" tool.

Copy Mailbox

The "Copy maibox" tool available in the "Mail Manager" section of the Control Panel allows you to copy the contents of a local or remote mailbox to a local mailbox on the hosting account with IMAP. The same tool is also available in the "Migration" section of the Control Panel. To copy a mailbox, you simply need to fill in the source IMAP account credentials (mailbox user/address, mailbox password, IMAP server), select the local destination mailbox, and click Continue. 

Credit Where Credit is Due

Our "Copy mailbox" instrument is based on the excellent imapsync tool by Gilles LAMIRAL. We could have created an in-house tool, but why reinvent the wheel, when both our and our users' experience with this tool has been nothing but positive.

Hopefully, you will find our implemention of the imapsync tool useful when you need to copy/synchronize a mailbox. We've got more mail-related features coming up soon, so stay tuned.

Best regards,

Dear Customers,

We have scheduled a maintenance of our core billing and support systems. This maintenance will affect the functionality of:

- the ticketing system,
- the Account Panel for partners and clients,
- the domain management interface,
- all order/renewal/upgrade/billing pages.

The maintenance will occur as follows:

Maintenance start time: April 28, 2022, 03:30 AM ЕDТ
Maintenance end time: April 28, 2022, 04:30 AM ЕDТ
Expected outage: up to 30 minutes in total

The maintenance will affect only our internal systems. Your hosting and domain services will NOT be affected by this scheduled maintenance.

If during the maintenance the ticketing system is unavailable to you, but you need to reach our support team, you can either use the contact form here.

Best regards,

Hello,

We are glad to announce that, starting today, you now have the option to use MySQL 8 databases with your applications.

You don't have to worry about your existing MySQL 5 databases; we are not removing MySQL 5 anytime soon. We are just upgrading the hosting environment with the option to use a newer version of MySQL that comes with security and performance improvements.

What's New in MySQL 8?

MySQL 8 brings a lot of new features, and it deprecates and removes some as well. You can find more information on the official website:

What Is New in MySQL 8.0

How Does the New MySQL Setup Work?

We have two separate MySQL instances running simultaneously - MySQL 5 and MySQL 8. From the hosting Control Panel > MySQL Databases section, you can choose which version to use for each new database you create and manage. You can have both MySQL 5 and MySQL 8 databases at the same time, but each database is separate and depends on the MySQL version chosen at creation time. This is the case with MySQL users as well - you need to create a new MySQL 8 user to access a MySQL 8 database with it. Тhe name of the main MySQL user remains the same for both MySQL versions, but for MySQL 8 we automatically set a random secure password that you need to change if you want to use the main user with the new MySQL version.

The data for each MySQL version can be backed up and restored separately via the Backup and Restore sections in the Control Panel. There is also a separate phpMyAdmin tool for each MySQL version.

Our 1-click software installation platform App Installer will use MySQL 8 for all new installations. With our WordPress installation tool, you will be able to select the desired MySQL version for each new WordPress installation.

How to Use MySQL 8?

MySQL 8 is available only for new databases, and you can easily choose the new MySQL version from the "Select MySQL version" section when creating a database from the Control Panel > MySQL Databases. Make sure you create a corresponding MySQL 8 user for the new database, with sufficient privileges to access and manage it. The new MySQL version uses a separate port (3308) and socket (/tmp/mysql8.sock).

How to Upgrade a MySQL 5 Database to MySQL 8?

To convert an existing database from MySQL 5 to MySQL 8, you should first create a new MySQL 8 database. Then, back up/export the MySQL 5 database and import it in the new one.

You will also need to update the configuration of the software which you want to connect to the MySQL 8 database. Make sure you change the values for MySQL database, username, password, and server/host accordingly.

What Happens With MySQL 5?

We will keep supporting and updating MySQL 5.7 on our servers. However, MySQL 5.7 will reach EOL (end of life) in October, 2023. Thus, we would strongly recommend you use MySQL 8 for new databases and consider upgrading your MySQL 5 databases in the near future.

The new MySQL version is already available to all hosting plans on all servers at no extra cost.

Best regards,

Dear Customers,

This message is to inform you of a planned configuration update on our mail servers in our US datacenter, that will take place on March 22, 2022. We will disable the outdated CRAM-MD5 authentication mechanism for connections on port 465.

Most probably, this configuration update will not affect you in any way, as most email software will detect automatically what authentication mechanisms are available. In any case, if you experience any problems with email sending on March 22, and if your email software uses port 465 for sending, you can set the authentication mechanism for the SMTP server to LOGIN or PLAIN. Alternatively, you can change the SMTP port to 587, where the outdated CRAM-MD5 mechanism will be supported a bit longer.

If you have any additional questions, you can always contact us.

Best regards,

About eHosted

eHosted has been in the web and Email hosting business since 1997 with many customers that have been with us since the beginning!

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