We will be taking downtime on most machines on Saturday 2011-07-30 starting at 14:00 BST (13:00 UTC)
We will be working through the various machine upgrades sequentially, but ensuring that where possible there is always backup services at least for inbound email.
Depending on how these upgrades go we may delay some upgrades until Sunday afternoon.
We will be taking several hours downtime on each of our main hosting machines next weekend to perform major OS upgrades.
We will be able to give details of exactly when later this week after we coordinate with our hosters regarding access.
The plan is for each machine to be out for no more than a couple of hours. And we will sequence the updates in such a way that incoming email is always deliverable, even if final delivery for reading it is delayed.
These upgrades are the concluding steps in our ongoing upgrade of our various machines with the aim of providing a stable platform for our mail and blog services for at least the next five years.
We’ve just updated our spam recognition mechanism to include a variation on ‘grey-listing’.
As part of the content analysis we now check for common phrases present that would not typically be expected in normal email. If they are present and we’ve not seen them from the particular sender recently we temporarily reject the message. If the message is presented again after a short delay we will mark the email as spam allowing your particular rule (accept,reject,tag) to occur and delivery appropriately. Since the vast majority of infected PCs acting as spam senders do not operate as proper email senders with industry accepted retry periods they do not send the same message again and so the spam no longer reaches your inbox.
Due to the release of security related package updates we’ve decided to accelerate our updating of the master machines that host the virtual machines that run our services.
We are currently updating the machine that hosts the secondary access. The backup receiving machines and the primaries for the Beta service. We hope to have the machine back up and running, along with all its virtual machines within a couple of hours.
On completion we will evaluate whether the remaining time available allows for the immediate upgrading of the primary services. We will post again once we have completed the first stage.
We’re having a disk problem on the main system, resulting in an
apparent heavy load. This results in 400-class errors reported
(451, etc) meaning “temporary error; please try again”.
As a temporary measure, reconfiguring your mail client to send
outbound via relay2.tidymail.co.uk will help. Unfortunately we
can’t do the same for accessing inbound mail.
More details when we have them.
We’re going for a reboot – but the disk is being recalcitrant.
We seem to be back. Inbound mail has stacked up in the queue on our secondary server; it will be passed to the primary shortly.
We’re rolling out to Tidymail the facility for users to search for items for them which were rejected. Most of these should be spam, but if you’ve been expecting a particular item which has not arrived, or if you just want to get a general flavour of the spam we’re rejecting on your behalf, the information is there. It’s pretty raw, being just lines selected from our logs.
This is only a beta service; we might change it or withdraw it once we have some experience of how well (or not) it works. One thing it will not show is rejects where we decided we didn’t like the sending system even before it got as far as telling us the item recipient. It doesn’t handle aliases or catchalls either.
To use the service you must have your mail client configured to authenticate, so that we know what name to search the logs for. Once that is set up, send a mail to rejectlog@tidymail.co.uk – the subject and content will be ignored and can be blank. You should get sent a mail with selected lines from our logs. The last couple of log files are searched, so there should be at least one full week’s coverage backward from the time of the request.
Each line should include a date & time, an IP address in square brackets (of the sending system) and a sender name in the form F=<user@domain> (NB: this is the envelope from, not the header from). There should also be a reason for rejection.
We’ll be interested in your comments on this facility. Mail to helpdesk@tidymail.co.uk
Our scheduled reboot of machines has been completed without incident.
All dependent services are running correctly.
Please contact us at helpdesk@tidymail.co.uk should you notice any problems.
We will be taking about an hour’s downtime on each of our major machines this coming Sunday 3rd April 2010 to allow us to install security updates.
During this time various portions of the service may be unavailable i.e. fetching/reading email, sending email. But due to the fact that we are doing these updates in sequence there will always be at least one machine which will accept incoming email so there will be no issue receiving.
We will start the outages from around 14:00 BST (13:00 GMT) though exact timings as things progress will be determined by how long it takes to verify each step.
We’ve added a facility for Wizmail (not Tidymail yet) users to search for items for them which were rejected. Most of these should be spam, but if you’ve been expecting a particular item which has not arrived, or if you just want to get a general flavour of the spam we’re rejecting on your behalf, the information is there. It’s pretty raw, being just lines selected from our logs.
This is only a beta service; we might change it or withdraw it once we have some experience of how well (or not) it works. One thing it will not show is rejects where we decided we didn’t like the sending system even before it got as far as telling us the item recipient. It doesn’t handle aliases or catchalls either.
To use the service you must have your mail client configured to authenticate, so that we know what name to search the logs for. Send a mail to rejectlog@wizmail.org – the subject and content will be ignored and can be blank. You should get sent a mail with selected lines from our logs.
Each line should include a date & time, an IP address in square brackets (of the sending system) and a sender name in the form F=<user@domain> (NB: this is the envelope from, not the header from). There should also be a reason for rejection.
We’ll be interested in your comments on this facility. Mail to helpdesk@wizmail.org
If all goes well we’ll roll out to Tidymail soon.
Additional – it turns out to be a really good idea to put pcmsuser@wizmail.org as a known-address, with an accept on it. Otherwise, a URL or phone-number which caused a content-based rejected, and got logged, will result in the rejection of the mail containing the log lines….
Following our system update this weekend we have retired the sqwebmail service. This has been replaced by the roundcube webmail service that was previously in beta.
The old URL for sqwebmail should automatically redirect to the new service at https://wizmail.org/webmail/
Please let us know about any problems you may experience with the new service by contacting us at helpdesk@wizmail.org
