When choosing the name for your domain, always remember that:

• You can't use stressed vowels (such as à, é, ò, etc.)
• You can't use symbols (such as ' + . , | ! " £ $ % & / ( ) = ? ^ * ç ° § ; : _ > ] [ @ )
• The name's length must range between 3 and 63 characters (excluding the extension)
• The name can neither start nor end with the character "-", although the character "-" is allowed inside the name. 

So, to name your domain you can use any letter, numbers between 0 and 9, and the symbol "-". Length may vary, from 3 to 63 types. For domain names registered under the geographical structure, the limit is between 1 and 63 types.

Anti-Bot-net Protection: Our recently introduced advanced bot-net protection continues to perform well against the growing number of bot-net attacks. We've observed that bot-net generated spam now comprises over 20% of the spam traffic, and on April 14, a single powerful attack accounted for 46% of all spam volume.

This graph shows the actual bot-net activity patterns. Spammers try to take advantage of the reactive nature of most spam protections by attacking with maximum volume when defenses are low.

Advanced Anti-virus Heuristics: In January, we completed the release of advanced anti-virus heuristics that specifically targeted zero-hour attacks (the period of vulnerability between a new virus in the wild and release of the anti-virus signature file). If the bot-net protection identifies a suspicious message, the anti-virus heuristics also scan the message for zero-hour viruses.

We've observed a number of attacks in which the anti-virus heuristics successfully identified viruses. For example, the anti-virus heuristics identified a viral message pattern -- later identified as a new strain of the Spy Agent Downloader ( http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_141846.htm ) -- in the wild at 11:12 AM GMT. At 2:50 PM GMT, when the volumes had grown dramatically, we received the new virus signature file from one of the anti-virus engines. 

Filter Updates: We continue to update filters to combat spammers’ tactics. Attacks blocked include new variations of pharmaceutical and automotive scams, penny stock ploys (ZYTO Corp), and numerous phishing attacks.

Spam Traffic Trends: Spam levels continue to remain high, and April 23rd brought a record level of spam for the year, with the 194 spam messages per user per day. With such high spam volume, organizations with in-house solutions require equally high capacity to handle the load. Since spikes in spam can happen overnight, we must carry precautionary -- but generally unused—capacity to avoid a meltdown.

An often endless battle for us is the battle against SPAM. We spend a great deal of effort and resources fighting spammers and educating our users on various tools and techniques used in the war. One common method for spammers to add new email addresses is the use of special software known as mail "harvesting bots" or "harvesters", which spider web pages to obtain e-mail addresses. If your web site contains an email address that is readable by a machine in the form of <username> at <domain> then your mail address is easily picked up by email harvest software. This includes email addreses that may be embedded in hidden fields in your forms.

One such method of fixing this problem is to obfuscate your email address and "mailto:" tag with encoded HTML characters. For example, this address, support@ihwy.com, works like you would expect a normal email address to work but is actually obfuscated and hidden SPAM Harvesters.

You can access this tool by going to: http://www.ihwy.com/Tools/Email-Obfuscation-Tool.aspx