Thanks for your concern, but this will not be kept going for years. Either if the sale of my business goes through as expected, they will move these accounts to their mailserver, or otherwise I will turn off the accounts of the people who were dialup customers 20 years ago and move the few internal mailboxes to a paid service.
And POP/IMAP/SMTP on this machine use TLS, it’s just webmail that is unencrypted. At least after some number like 5 or 10 failed logins it disables web access for that account. No timeout, has to be turned back on by an admin. I could just turn off webmail if you’d prefer. I’m not sure if anyone uses it anyway, most customers from back in the dialup days used POP3, or have migrated to using IMAP on their phone. The thing about Chrome defaulting to HTTPS doesn’t explain the behavior I ran into. Lots of things only support HTTP, like if I’m configuring a Nanostation. BTW there is a configuration item in Chrome to turn off automatically redirecting to HTTPS. But previously I would get a warning, or I could manually change it from https:// to http://. And here’s the weird thing, if I turn off Safe Browsing in Chrome, the problem goes away. I’m not saying to do that, but HTTP isn’t one of the things Safe Browsing is supposed to block. The sad thing is at this point I think the explanation for these old dialup customer email accounts finally going inactive so I can delete them is no longer that people are finally getting a Gmail account, it’s that they are showing up in the obituary pages. From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Josh Luthman Sent: Sunday, November 8, 2026 11:35 AM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] site can't be reached using Chrome Because Chrome will default to https instead of http. >And an update could change the default settings. 2023 - https://blog.chromium.org/2023/08/towards-https-by-default.html Some things are really dumb that it's the internet provider to blame, but my guy you're running an unencrypted website + in 2026 + email login/content. If you're concerned about this thing falling apart, move the ENTIRE machine into a VM. Backups are easier and roll backs are basically instant. It'll be a whole lot easier to keep it going for years. On Fri, Nov 6, 2026 at 1:31 PM Ken Hohhof <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Trust me, I’d rather turn off this server than mess with it. Or disable webmail altogether. 4 years EOS, perpetual license but if it crashed I’m not at all sure I could reinstall it. Mostly ex dialup customers who resist even a fairly rude suggestion they need to migrate to an actual email provider. I’m also in discussions to sell my business, and the buyer would probably move these accounts to their mailserver, or else tell the freeloaders to move on. I was more interested why Chrome suddenly acted like a site was unreachable without anything changing at the server end. And yet Edge and Firefox connected as usual. So I was thinking what changed in Chrome, and what else will it affect? Digging into it, I was surprised how many related settings there were in Chrome. Most of us would never go digging into all these advanced settings, yet a lot of them would clearly affect our browsing. And an update could change the default settings. And of course, if it happens to a customer, it’s the Internet provider’s fault. From: AF <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > On Behalf Of Josh Luthman Sent: Friday, November 6, 2026 12:10 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [AFMUG] site can't be reached using Chrome I understand but if the web engine is running via the web server binary, you'd have to fix that binary. If the pages are being served via IIS, spend 15 minutes and install the SSL cetificate. See what is listening on :80 right now - netstat -aon|findstr :80 On Wed, Nov 4, 2026 at 1:04 PM Ken Hohhof <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: I believe it’s Windows Server 2012. From: AF <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > On Behalf Of Joe Novak Sent: Wednesday, November 4, 2026 11:45 AM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [AFMUG] site can't be reached using Chrome If the Windows version is recent, installing SSL certificates in IIS probably won't be too terrible. I'm sure someone has a script for Let's Encrypt that mostly automates the process for you. If it's virtual you can always take a snapshot before hand. -- AF mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
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