We'll be upgrading our spam filtering system today which should lower "false positives" and catch a higher percentage of spam before you ever see it. There may be a few minutes here and there where delivery of mail will be delayed but it should not be noticeable to most. We'll be watching the results closely after the upgrade is complete. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you feel delays are occurring for longer than just a couple of minutes today.

This morning we are seeing delays with email of several hours. The DNS server stopped responding which caused the mail server to not know where to deliver its mail, resulting in the mail being spooled. We have restarted the DNS server and mail is flowing through but there is a fair sized backup of mail in the spool which will take a few hours to catch up. We saw this same behavior last Friday evening as well. To prevent this type of failure in the future we have put a process in place to verify that the DNS server is responding properly and if not, it will automatically be restarted.

My apologies for the mail delay again.
-tom

We will be rebooting one of our main web servers today (11:00 a.m. PDT) to take advantage of an additional processor in the computer. I expect that system to be down for appx. 15 minutes, from shutdown to fully active web serving. Email will also be delayed during this time period. The additional processor will significantly increase the speed and reliability of the system.

UPDATE: Everything appears to have gone smoothly. We got started just a few minutes later than expected and had down time of appx 15 minutes. Thanks all for your patience!

We'll be moving our primary email server to a faster machine today. This will cause POP3 and IMAP service to be unavailable for appx 15 30 minutes. All incoming mail will be queued for the few minutes that we are making the final move.

The new mail system will provide faster processing and more reliable logins. The webmail interface will also see a nice improvement in speed and reliability.

UPDATE: The move is complete. It looks to have taken closer to 40 minutes. We have a few corner cases to deal with but for the general mail account, everything is in good shape. Thanks for your patience during the move. And please do let us know if you see any problems.

We will need to reboot the system shortly to take care of a kernel bug. This affects you if your site is hosted on ring.vpop.net. The anticipated downtime is less than 30 minutes.

UPDATE: The system maintenance has been completed. We were down from appx 12:21PDT through 12:38PDT. Thanks again for your patience!

We saw a problem with our primary email handler early yesterday morning which continued through the late morning. Mail was not lost but rather, it was spooled for delivery once the mail system came back up. New email messages have been flowing fine since yesterday afternoon but those messages in the mail queue from the outage are trickling out at a terribly slow pace. We are working on getting that process to speed up and hope to have all queued mail delivered shortly.

During this process we have temporarily turned off spam filtering. Once everything is caught up we will turn the spam filtering system back on and we should be in good shape.

UPDATE: The mail queue has emptied and we turned the spam filters back on. We are monitoring things closely and right now, things are looking very good. Thanks for your patience!

We recently implemented a feature in our SPAM prevention mechanism called "greylisting".  This feature can be turned on/off for your entire domain or individual email accounts.  The greylist is a simple mechanism which has no possibility of miscategorizing your inbound mail as spam or legitimate.  It works by deferring all new mail temporarily, requiring that the sending mail server retry the message after 10 minutes.  Once a mail server connects and delivers mail successfully to the system, the combination of the mail server's IP address, the "To:" and "From:" fields are added to a database which allows all mail in the future to come through directly.

Email systems are purposely built to handle brief outages so any legitimate email should retry shortly after our initial deferral.  But spammers don't often take the time to retry messages based on email standards so their mail never makes it through.

You may experience some delay intitially from certain addresses.  If you have a problem which needs to be addressed, please do let us know.  We are whitelisting the major providers so they will never experience the delay but the service seems to be handling mail quite efficiently and with little impact on delivery times.

Look for the option in your Mail Admin area and you can choose to turn it on or off.

Shortly after the previous post we were able to convince SBC to remove the block on mail coming from our network.  The issue remains tricky because they do not inform us when changes occur and tend to make decisions without investigating first (at least in our case).  So for now, the SBC problem is behind us.

Many VPOP customers have mail for their domain forwarded to the email account of their ISP and many of these folks use SBC (via Yahoo DSL, sbcglobal.net, etc.).  If you use SBC or one of its affiliates and your email is forwarded to your account, SBC is now blocking it.  We are working to get the problem resolved to the best of our abilities but it is largely out of our hands.  If you are experiencing bounced email message it would be best for you too to contact SBC and ask them to cease bouncing your domain's email.

For those of you with web hosting accounts which provides for POP3 mail, the problem can be remedied by removing the forwarding rule and retrieving the email directly from our servers with your favorite mail reader or our webmail system.  If you are unsure how to accomplish this, drop us a note and we'll get you started.

We are working on a new server to replace the aging "ring.vpop.net" server.  If your website is hosted by that server, be on the lookout for a nice upgrade.  We'll post again as we get close to deployment so you can be on the lookout for the few needed moments of downtime associated with the move.  We are a little extra paranoid when adding new servers so we stress test them over and over again before actual deployment.  Look for the change to come towards the end of March, 2004.

UPDATE: The new server is in place and working quite well.  We had a couple of brief hiccups which affected a couple of customers and to those folks, our sincere apologies.  Each time we upgrade the operating system or a complete server we update the scripting language engines and associated libraries and a couple of these libraries did not get recompiled.  They have been noted for future upgrades so they are not missed again.  In the end, we are quite pleased with the performance and added redundancy this new server is providing.  If you happen to notice anything funny, please do not hesitate to contact us: admin@vpop.net  OR 888-811-8767

There is a fairly new tactic being used by the "bad guys" in an attempt to get you to install their virus or worm, sent via email.  Many virus filters will stop attachments which are not password-protected.  And many people will open a document which has a password associated with it, assuming that it may be "official".  The New Scientist has a brief article on the topic and it is worth the 60 second read.

There is a new virus out there which is being sent to domain owners across the internet.  It may claim to be "From:" your domain admin or even from "staff@vpop.net" (or some other authentic looking address).  The message will contain a ZIP or EXE attachment and request that you install it for protection.  Be assured that VPOP will never send you a message with a file attached that you should install -- Never.  You should be extremely careful when opening any attachment but be especially careful when you receive one which you did not expect.

We are currently blocking most (if not all) instances of this type of message due to our spam and virus filtering but it is possible that something will make it through the defense system.  Again, please be cautious when opening any email and even more so when opening an attachment of any sort.

We have implemented a new webmail system for your use, provided you have a POP3 or IMAP account with VPOP.  The webmail system can be found here: http://webmail.vpop.net/.

Spam Filtering has been enabled across the system.  If you have a POP3 or IMAP account with VPOP, you can massage the setting in your mail admin area.  The spam filtering works by evaluating inbound mail and if it meets the general "score" of your level of spam filtering, it will either be passed through to you or bounced to the [apparent] sender.  If you have filtering on your email client, you may opt for the "Tag Only" mode which adds a header to your messages and provides a score which you can then filter upon.