The beta webmail service we had been running, ‘Prayer’, has been withdrawn with immediate effect.
We have been reviewing its usability and have concluded that does not provide sufficient user facilities over the existing offering, nor does it provide suitable administration capability particularly when trying to diagnose user problems.
We would like to thank all our users who tried it.
We will be taking the machine hosting the main wizmail.org email service down tomorrow afternoon (Sunday 29th Nov).
This is to allow us to replace a failed disk and perform preventative maintenance on the server.
We expect the downtime to commence sometime around 15:00 and last for a couple of hours. The outage may be shorter as part of the work has already been performed on the replacement disks.
During this time it will not be possible to send or receive email, though any inbound email will be queued on the alternate inbound server during the outage and will be delivered to your inboxes as soon as the main server is back.
We will be taking the machine hosting the post.wizards.co.uk outbound email service down tomorrow afternoon (Sunday 29th Nov).
This is to allow us to replace a failed disk and perform preventative maintenance on the server.
We expect the downtime to commence sometime around 15:00 and last for a couple of hours. The outage may be shorter as part of the work has already been performed on the replacement disks.
During the outage it will not be possible to send email if you are configured to use post.wizards.co.uk as your outbound SMTP server. As an alternative you could configure your outbound to use post.tidymail.co.uk, but you must also have a client that can authenticate when it sends. Details of configuring common clients along with technical details for other clients can be found on our Configuring Your Client For Tidymail page.
Just to let you know that next Sunday, 22nd November during the afternoon we will be rebooting the machines that handle email.
This will allow us to boot with an updated kernel which has a number of security fixes we regard as needed.
The outage should last less than 10 minutes for each machine, and we will only reboot one machine at a time to ensure that incoming email is not blocked. Doing this means no inbound email will be lost, only that for the duration of the reboot your will not be able to collect email.
We have noted that some of our customers are receiving email purporting to be from ourselves claiming they are over their storage limit and that they need to reply with their account details including password to resolve the storage issue.
These emails are not from us and should be deleted.
We will not ask for your email passwords, ever.
Subject: Your mailbox has exceeded the storage limit. Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:43:42 -0800 From: ServiceHelp Desk <admin@webmail.org> Reply-To: adminwebct@tmail.tv To: undisclosed-recipients:; Dear Webmail Account User, This message was sent automatically by a program on Webmail admin center which periodically checks the size of inbox, The program is run automatically to ensure no user inbox grows too large. If your inbox becomes too large, you will be unable to receive new emails. Just before this message was sent, you are currently running on 20.9 GB, You have has exceeded the storage limit which is 20GB. To help us re-set your Account SPACE on our database prior to maintain your INBOX, you must reply to this e-mail providing us your the Below information: E-mail ( ... ...... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ) Username/ID ( .all.. ... ... ... ... ... ) Current Password ( ... ...... ... ) Retype Password: ( ... ...... ... ) From this point you will be unable to receive new email as it will be returned to the sender, Provide the above information to enable us help reset your webmail immediately. NOTE: Your Webmail Account Expire in Three (3) Days. After you read this message, it is best to REPLY with the required information to upgrade MailBox. Reply to this message immediately to Re activate your Account. Thank you for your cooperation. Webmail Help Desk. System Administrator -------------------------------------------------
We made a few adjustments to the URL scanning code in the past couple of weeks to allow it to be more effective as the spammers mutate to avoid earlier block techniques.
We’ve got a few more steps before we can administer the spammed telephone numbers via our management interface but for the time being we’ve added a selection of the more egregious examples to the database manually.
We’ve just rolled out new code to block certain spam message types which either contain newly morphed trojans or point to sites which ask you to download trojans under false pretences, or just infect your machine if you visit.
The most recent types of these have been
Needless to say none of these actually come from the companies and institutions involved.
Our apologies to our customers who have received these sorts of email prior to this rollout. We always endeavour to avoid inaccurate blocking so before making these sorts of change we have to check carefully that these filters don’t have an adverse effect on genuine email.
And if you are still getting these sorts of email do please let us know at the helpdesk address.
The number of connections to both our primary and (mainly) secondary MX’s dropped by about 50% about 11pm local on Friday. Perhaps a major spammer has been knocked off? The effect is quite clear on the front-page graph – we’re accepting mails from a far higher percentage of connections now, merely because the total is less.
Update, Monday:
Hah! They were trying to fool us. 7:30 this morning, back they come,
This a short post to cover the basic of the events over the last 72 hours. Once I’ve caught up on some sleep I’ll go over this posting and prepare another if there’s anything I missed. Read more »
We are going to be taking an outage on our primary machines this Sunday to replace some disks that are being problematic.
We will take each machine down in turn to ensure that there is always a machine for incoming email, but mail will not be available to fetch/read whilst your primary machine is down.
This is a precautionary measure as we have properly configured RAID systems to ensure availability so no data will be lost and these drives could normally be replaced without downtime, but we have some configuration updates to install that will require at least a reboot so we are combining the events to minimise the downtime.
The outages will commence sometime after 14:00 on Sunday and we hope to complete by 18:00 though some overrun on individual services may occur.
