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.
We have just introduced the beta-test version of a new webmail system for all Tidymail users.
The service is based on the prayer webmail program, with some adjustments for our environment.
So, please try out the new service and let us know what you think by mailing us at helpdesk@tidymail.co.uk
This beta service is now closed.
We have just introduced a new webmail version for our beta-system users at wizmail.org.
The service is based on the prayer webmail program, with some adjustments for our environment.
So to all wizmail.org webmail users, please try out the new service and let us know what you think by mailing us at helpdesk@wizmail.org
This beta service is now closed.
We’ve just rolled out a new feature. Image-Only Spam Blocking. This is a method of spotting the resurgence of image-based spam where there is no accompanying text or clickable links, but where the spammers include the name of the site in the image itself sometimes with a help section explaining how to type the URL into your browser.
This is currently enabled as part of the URL blocking code which works on the clickable links.
Number of connections doubled over the last week….. they’ve found us again. We do seem to be keeping most of the extra load out, which is good.
There will be an outage of 3 hours commencing at 15:00 GMT on Sunday 15th March 2009.
During this time we will be performing an Operating System upgrade on the secondary Tidymail machine that is used for backup of incoming email and by those customers sending via post.wizards.co.uk.
During this time sending email via post.wizards.co.uk. If you require the ability to send email during this time you should reconfigure your client to use the post.tidymail.co.uk server Please note that this server requires you to authenticate to send. Step-by-step instructions for configuring your email client can be found here
There will be an outage of 3 hours commencing at 15:00 GMT on Sunday 8th March 2009.
During this time we will be performing Operating System upgrades on both main Tidymail machines. The outages will be sequential which mean there will always be a machine able to receive incoming email.
During this time sending or collection of email will be intermittently unavailable..
All of our metered rates have been dropping steadily this week,
bar the “accepted mails”, to maybe two-thirds of the previous week.
This follows the expected steady ramp-up post new-year.
Maybe we fallen off some spammer’s radar?
I’m not complaining.
