We are installing some new servers this coming Sunday 27th.
Whilst this should not affect services we also need to perform some maintenance on some of the existing machines. There will be short outage of each of the machines but these should not take more than a few minutes each. These outages will be sequenced in such a way that incoming email always has a machine to accept, only fetching email will be affected when we cycle that particular machine.
Today is World IPv6 Launch Day when IPv6 gets permanently enabled for service and equipment.. In the words of the global launch site
Major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world are coming together to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services by 6 June 2012.
We have been working hard behind the scenes in our own small way to make sure that both Tidymail and Wizmail are available on both IPv4 and IPv6.
We actually completed the bulk of this work over a month ago and have been testing and monitoring everything since and are now pleased to announce
Tidymail and Wizmail are now IPV6 enabled.
The websites, the POP and IMAP mail fetch services and the SMTP mail sending service are now available over IPv4 or IPv6.
This means all email hosted domains that have the correct MX settings are now automatically globally visible via IPv4 and IPv6. And once we have ironed out any initial wrinkles with general access and visibility we’ll be trying to see if there are any new services we can offer with this expanded IP space, so stay tuned.
We have installed a new beta version of the webmail client.
Based on the new version 0.8 roundcubemail code with the new “larry” skin this offers a much better desktop feel and a more modern experience.
We have made this the default skin for all Wizmail users and we hope you like it. If you have any feedback regarding this please contact us at helpdesk@wizmail.org
We successfully upgraded the main systems yesterday. All systems are now updated to level designed to give major stability for several years to come.
This completes our major operating system upgrade project and now lets us move forward in improving the features and quality of service we provide.
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.
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.
