December 31, 2003 notice regarding new mailserver

Greetings,

As part of our effort to cut down on the amount of objectionable and unsolicited commercial email you receive, and to extend the services and features available to you, Skypoint has placed a new mailserver online. We believe the cornucopia of new improvements in this mail server will have a favorable impact on your email experience.

One of the new features supported is the ability for you to use a username and password to identify yourself as a Skypoint client before sending email out through our servers. This means that you can now send mail via our servers from anywhere in the world by providing your username and password before sending mail.

Under normal circumstances, when connecting via dialup modem or DSL through our Minneapolis / St. Paul facilities you will not need to provide a username and password as we will continue to support the previous unauthenticated access to our mail servers from that hubroom. If you connect to Skypoint through other facilities, including our Duluth / Superior, regional, and national networks, or if you travel and use our facilities in roaming mode, authenticated sending will be required in the very near future.

The exception alluded to above, for people connecting via our Minneapolis / St. Paul facilities, is that people using many versions of the Netscape mail client will find that their Netscape software will require authenticated sending even while connecting via our facilities that do NOT require this. While sending authenticated is good practice whether or not it is required, some people may find this Netscape-imposed authentication step to be a nuiscance (asking them to enter a password before sending email).

Unfortunately this is a built in feature of Netscape. Other email clients that we support, among them Eudora, Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, do not require the username and password to be keyed in unless they are configured to do so. If you find Netscape.s forced authentication to be a nuisance, we encourage you to use one of these other email clients, and will be happy to assist you in setting one of them up as an alternative on your computer.

If you wish to continue using Netscape as your email reader, and you would like to prevent Netscape from asking for a username and password, there is a way to disable this feature on PC based systems. We have provided a link to a page on our web site which details the steps involved in this process. You can find the steps involved here:

http://www.skypoint.com/help/smtp-auth.php

Please note that making this change to your Netscape reader will prevent you from using authenticated access in situations where it may be required, so you should NOT make this change if you plan to be using our roaming network while traveling.

We thank you for your continued support and hope that you will find the speed and reliability of the new server brings added productivity to you as we enter the new year.

Wishing you the very best,

SkyPoint Communications Technical Services Staff

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