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 This has been replaced by the roundcube webmail service that was previously in beta.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://tidymail.co.uk/webmail/
Please let us know about any problems you may experience with the new service by contacting us at helpdesk@tidymail.co.uk
We are pleased to announce a new beta webmail service – Roundcube.
This new webmail service can be found by following the Read Mail – * BETA * link on the Tidymail front page.
We are pleased to announce a new beta webmail service – Roundcube.
This new webmail service can be found by following the Read Mail – * BETA * link on the Wizmail front page.
The beta webmail service we had been running, ‘Prayer’, has been withdrawn with immediate effect.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 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.
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 »
