Private Box News

Security updates will be applied to our main server next Tuesday (22nd May) from 10pm till 2am.

The server will be down for approx 10 - 30 mins during this time.

If you find you cannot access our website please try again in 30 mins time next Tuesday.

If you find you cannot access our website any other time let us know - there is something wrong!

All the best,
Gareth & the Private Box team.

There was an issue logging into the website from 6.30am this morning until 8am this morning.

We are really sorry about this - we have servers that should be available 100% of the time.

This was due to a network controller failing at Web Drive which has been fixed.

Let me know if you were affected by this.

Regards,
Gareth and the Private Box team.

April 25th is ANZAC day in New Zealand and is a public holiday.

We will be back open for business on Friday at 9am.

Thanks,
Private Box Team.

We have two new features for Private Box! These are:

1) New User Menus
2) Scanned mail to email changes

New User Menus
We have made our menu larger and it will now highlight where you are. This is the first in a long list of usability improvements? Have feedback - let us know at in the support forums.

Scanned mail to email changes
Now if you get your scanned mail sent via email we are sending one letter per email. This should make it easier to archive etc. To enable scanned mail to email goto My Account > Scanned Mail.

Hello all,

Our server will be down for 10 minutes for security updates between 10pm and 2am tonight.

If you have trouble accessing the system during this time please try again in 10 minutes.

Regards,
The Private Box Team.

Hi all,

We will be closed this Friday (29th Mar) and following Monday (1st Apr) for Easter.

We will be open 9am Tuesday on the 2nd April. All mail will be processed by Wednesday 3pm.

We wish you a safe and happy Easter break.

Kind Regards,
Gareth & the Private Box team.

Hi all,

This expo is being held 1st March until 3rd March at the claudelands showgrounds in Hamilton.

We will be exhibiting there so come and see us! We have free tickets to give away at the show - so get your friend to run in and see us. We are at site 88!

For more info see
http://www.nzmotorhomeshow.co.nz/page/pageid/2145839420.

Regards,
Private Box.

Security updates will be run on the server from 10pm tonight until 2am. You should expect intermittent availability during this time.

Regards,
Private Box Team.

There was a system update today and some users are having issues logging in.

To fix this you can try one of the following:
1) Close your browser and try again
2) Wait 24 hours
3) Remove your cookies - help to remove cookies can be found here.

Sorry about this issue - the system update should have been completely invisible to our users!

Please let us know if you have been affected by this issue.

Regards,
Private Box Team

Please be advised 6th February is a public holiday in New Zealand.

Kind Regards,
Private Box Team.

Hi all,

Quick note to let you know the office will be closed on Monday the 21st January 2013 as it is a public holiday in the Wellington region.

Any questions or concerns will be answered when we re-open as per normal on Tuesday 22nd.

Thanks,
Gareth & the team.

Hi all,

Hope you all are having a great break with those in the southern hemisphere having a good summer (and those up in the northern hemisphere enjoying the some snow perhaps!).

We are currently working through the backlog of mail and should have everything up to date by 5pm Wednesday.

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

Regards,
Gareth

Seasons greetings!

We are now closed for Christmas and will re-open on the 7th January 2013.

There is limited email support on support (at) privatebox.co.nz.

We wish you a safe and happy holiday period.

Kind Regards,
Gareth & the Private Box team.

Hi all,

We are moving our servers onto a NZ based cloud platform tomorrow morning between 8am and 10am. Everything going well the site should only be unavailable for 5 - 10 mins during this time.

As always - if you have any questions or concerns please let us know.

Thanks,
The Private Box Team.

Hi all,

If you find yourself on the road a lot and you want to receive your mail via a NZ Post Shop you can do this using the addresses found at http://www.privatebox.co.nz/mail-forwarding/counterdeliverylocations.pdf.

Remember - the following rules apply:
1) Mail must be picked up within 30 days
2) A single post shop cannot be used more than 90 days
3) If you break either of these rules any future mail will be returned to sender without notice!

Thanks,
Gareth & the team
Private Box

Hi all,

We will be closing on the 23rd December and re-opening on the 7th Jan at 9am. The office will be open on Saturday 22nd December for a half day - be sure to get any requests in before then!

And NZ Post have released their delivery info for over xmas - this can be seen here http://www.nzpost.co.nz/christmas#mailingdates

Thanks,
The Private Box Team.

Monday 22nd October is Labour Day in New Zealand and is a public holiday.

Our office will re-open on the 23rd as normal.

Thanks.

We have had reports that some people using mobile devices on both the mobile and normal members area were being logged out repeatedly. There is a quite a technical explanation below to what was causing this.

We have now made some changes to fix this issue and you should find you get the full 30 minute session you would normally. Please let us know if you do not!

Technical background - as a security precaution we logged the machine address (IP number) when a user logs in. We then make sure all future requests come from the same address - if it does not the session becomes invalid and the user will be logged out. This is to stop someone 'hijacking' your session. Hijacking your session is pretty tricky thing to do - they would need to have access to your device and be able to copy all of your browser session data to another machine (all within the 30 minute window). The problem is that some mobile devices as a power saving feature will disconnect in the background and reconnect when you click on a website. This means your ISP will assign a *new* address to the device. This new address is deemed to be different to the original you signed in with, the session will become invalid and the user logged out. We have now changed this to be less stringent meaning that all users are now checked for part of the address. For example - if you logon from 123.123.123.123 (an IP address) it will check to make sure you are from 123.123.123.*. This is known as a subrange and will mean you are still logging in using the same ISP (eg. vodafone) and that it is likely your IP address has just been renewed. A hacker would be very unlikely to be able to use an address in this range (and within the 30 min window).

Whew - got there in the end. Any questions or concerns please just ask us on support (at) privatebox.co.nz.

Thanks,
Gareth & the team

A recent mail out from ANZ National stating that they intend to merge their two brands together (ie. discard the 'National' part).

These are coming in as a sender 'Box 2211, Wellington' with a weight of 27 grams. The brochure contained inside is unscannable.

We made the decision this morning to stop adding this mail to our members accounts as information regarding this merge is available here.

If you wish to receive this item (and you are a customer of ANZ National) please get in touch this week and we will add it for you when it arrives. Otherwise this mail will be destroyed using our secure document destruction service (as junk mail is normally processed).

Please get in touch if you have any questions or concerns.

Thanks,
Gareth
Private Box Manager

Just had a query from a customer regarding security of Private Box in regards to just having a username / password combination.

This is a very safe and secure method of access.

The only threat to this is a 'key logger' which is a piece of software
that monitors your keyboard input. If you are using your own devices
then this shouldn't be a problem as any good virus checker will notice
if this is occurring and tell you about it.

If you are some where public and feel that your keyboard input could be
monitored there a couple of options you can use:
1. Try using an online keyboard (like
http://nettuts.s3.amazonaws.com/378_jqueryKeyboard/demo/index.html) to write your username & password out. You can then cut n paste the
values to our screen. This will fool a key logger.
2. An even simpler method is to open notepad and:
a. write the last half of your password in notepad
b. write the first half of your password in the PrivateBox login field
c. transfer the last half into the PrivateBox login field

And viola - you have now fooled any key logging software.

Its not fool proof but it is a step in the right the direction.

There are more info here regarding using public terminals - http://www.nomad4ever.com/2008/02/21/8-tips-to-fool-keyloggers-in-public-internet-cafes/

Thanks,
The Private Box Team.

We are pleased to announce that you can now get your scanned messages as attachments via email.

To enable this please go to My Account > Scanned Mail and select 'Attach It'. This will attach any scanned mail when it is done.

Any questions please let us know!

Regards,
The Private Box Team.

The New Zealand Virtual Assistants Conference debuts in Wellington this week. Bringing together VAs from all over New Zealand to share ideas and technologies to this rapidly growing industry.

And we are presenting today - links for this presentation can be seen at
www.privatebox.co.nz/vaconference/index.html

Our website has been unavailable since 4.36pm NZ time yesterday.

We apologise for this outage.

We have taken steps for this not to happen again.

Regards,
The Private Box Team.

There are some changes afoot which will affect customers who wish to incorporate a New Zealand company from overseas.

The updated Bill will require all New Zealand companies to have either one New Zealand-resident director or a local agent. The Registrar of Companies will also get expanded powers.

The measures are designed to shore up New Zealand's company registration process against criminal activity from overseas.

See Cabinet paper below for detailed information.

NZ Company Announcement

As always feel free to contact us with your questions or concerns.

Regards,
The Registered Office Team @ Private Box

Hi all,

If you had logged on in the last couple of days you would have received security warnings as our Security Certificate had expired. The website was still 100% secure and these warnings could safely be ignored.

This has now been fixed and all systems are returned to normal.

We are sorry about this.

If you have any concerns regarding this issue please get in touch.

Kindest Regards,
Gareth Foster
Managing Director

Our security certificate has expired we are sorry to say.. it will be renewed very shortly!

We apologise for all the warning messages you must be getting when you are logging in.

Any concerns please let us know.

Regards,
The Private Box Team.

Due to popular request we have now added a "Return to Sender" option to the list of available mail actions.

This can be actioned via your inbox and selecting the items you want returned to sender. Then select "Return To Sender" as the action. Click "Go".

The item will then be stamped "Return to sender" and returned via normal post. There is a charge of $1.50 for this service.

You will also be able to set this up to occur automatically on a single identifier. Just go to your identifier set-up area (available under My Mail Box or My Business Plus) and you will find the "RTS" option under 'Forwarding Service". This will be available over the next week.

Any questions or concerns - please get in touch with our Wellington branch.

All the best,
The Private Box Team.

We seem to be getting a high volume of mail missing your Suite # and this is causing quite a bit of extra work for us.

As such we will be increasing the cost of Badly Address Mail from 60c to 90c.

We hope this encourages our customers to ensure that their Suite # is included in their address.

This will only affect customer on standard personal and business plans. Business Plus customers are unaffected.

On the first of July the cost of sending in New Zealand has increased by 10 cents per class. For example - a normal letter (A4 folded in 3) now costs 70c instead of 60c. A 'large' letter now costs $1.40 (A4 folded in half) instead of $1.20. An extra large (A4) now costs $2.10 and oversized letters are $2.80 (instead of $1.80 and $2.40 respectively).

We are looking at ways to break-down our mail forwarding costs into postage price and handling fee so it will be obvious how much we are charging compared to NZ Post - although this is a little way off! In the meantime we have increased the minimum cost for a single letter from $2.00 to $2.20.

They also put up the cost of their PO Boxes. We will absorb these costs.

Sorry for the bad news - any feedback or questions are welcome!

Thanks,
The Private Box Team.

Hi all,

It seems that due to a glitch with last weeks upgrade the Mail Received notices have not been sent out. This has now been remedied.

We are sorry about this delay and hope you are not badly affected. You have been please get in touch with us.

Hopefully that is the last issue with the upgrade! There have been one or two niggling issues - rest assured that we now have a brand new server that is even more secure than the previous one!

Any questions or concerns feel free to get in touch.

Regards,
Gareth & The Private Box Team.

Hi all,

We changed our server last week and it seems our old server was still sending customers messages over the weekend. These can all be ignored - most messages will be regarding 'Auto-topup Failed (error 32)" or "Reminder to topup".

The older server has now been ordered to keep quiet so this should now resolve it - so we are sorry for any confusion and irritation this may cause our customers!

Our old server was running an "end of life" operating system which had been shown (we just had a big security audit completed) to have a few vulnerabilities and we worked out it was easier to change to a new server than trying to patch everything. We thought it went smoothly - except no-one told the old server to stop doing what its always done. So we apologise for this oversight.

Please get in touch if you have any questions or concerns.

Upgrading our OS version at the moment - you may notice the website down for a few minutes as we switch everything over.

This has now been completed - please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

We are celebrating our lovely queens birthday on Monday and is a national holiday.

As such our office will be closed on the 4th of June and will re-open at 9am on the 5th June.

We would like to wish our lovely Queen happy birthday - for when ever it really is!

All the best,
The Private Box Team.

We are presenting at the New Zealand Virtual Assistant Conference 2012. More info here - http://www.vaconference.co.nz/

If you are a 'Virtual Assistant' in New Zealand - be sure to check it out!

Can be found on Twitter / Facebook: @vaconference.

Aura Information Security are conducting a security sweep of Private Box systems. This may affect the speed of some parts of our web site.

Please let us know if you notice anything odd (about the site) or the slow down makes the site unusable.

Thanks,
The Private Box Team.

25th April is Anzac day and a public holiday. This is a remembrance day for the New Zealand and Australian soldiers who died in World War I.

As such Private Box will be closed all day on the 25th. We will re-open with normal hours on the 26th April.

You can find out more about Anzac day here -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anzac_Day

Hi all,

Just to let you know it is now NZ Tax time and as such if you have received an item from IRD (and it cannot be scanned) you can assume it will be your Personal (IR3) or Company (IR4) Income Tax forms. They are generally around 78 grams in weight.

Best Regards,
The Team @ Private Box.

We would like to wish everyone a safe and happy Easter break. We will be closing in about 15 mins and will re-open on Tuesday the 10th April at 9am.

Have a great weekend!

The Team @ Private Box.

In case you haven't heard the Registered Office service is back up and running. If you have a Registered Office with us this can now be displayed in your account - just go to My Account > Enable Registered Office Service. You will then be able to view all of your companies linked with your account.

Please be advised 6th February is a public holiday in New Zealand.

We wish everyone a safe and happy long weekend!

Kind Regards,
Private Box Team.

We have been advised by our hosts that they are upgrading our server.

This will take place on the nights of the 22nd and 23rd Nov between 10pm and 4am NZT (11am - 5pm GMT).

The server should only be down for 10-15 mins during this time - so if you find you cannot access please come back again later!

Regards,
The Private Box Team

One of our new members loved our service so much they put up a blog about it. You can read it here -http://mailforwardingsolutions.blogspot.com

Gareth Foster (and my team) became majority share-holders of Private Box Limited on the 1st November. We are really excited to be of service to you!

So this news shouldn't affect you are all - except now that the sale is complete innovation and improvements can re-commence on the system! So - if you have any great ideas on how to improve things for you - our lovely customer - please let us know!

And please bear with us as we get ourselves up to speed with all the Private Box business systems.

Nga mihi nui (Kind regards),
Gareth Foster
Director & Lead Programmer

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The registered office service is currently on hold for any new customers. If you intend to sign up and use our address for your company please call us.

For us in New Zealand Spring is almost here, as we head towards our busy season we would like to make the time to thank you for your continued support. If you every have any queries please do not hesitate to call or email.

NZ Post has cancelled many deliveries around the country for a second day. Mail services are expected to resume tomorrow.

Due to the snowstorms we are currently experiencing; our international mail services may be delayed.

Sorry we will be closed on Monday the 6th of May as it is a public holiday.

For a limited time we will be giving away 60 Days free trial to all new signups who complete our online survey. Don’t worry; we will not be signing you up to any scary mailing list or passing your information on to any one else.

Fill out the form and get started today.
http://www.privatebox.co.nz/mailplans.php

Offer Valid till 15 May 2011