Virtualnames.co.uk system status

Mail problems

2009-07-01T15:25:19+00:00

1st Jul 2009 15:11

As customers may know we have experienced serious mail issues today. We believe these have been resolved, but there may still be some delays in delivering mail that is queued on external servers.

The problems were caused by loading issues on our backend database servers that handle the mail system. Unfortunately a massive increase in the amount of incoming spam mail caused problems across the whole of the mail system. We have now taken steps to isolate the backend mailboxes from loading issues caused by incoming mail, and blocked much of the incoming spam.

We sincerely apologise to customers for these problems. We are fully aware of how important reliable email is and we will be taking further steps to reduce the incidence of problems like this in future.

Mail Server Problem

2009-07-01T10:33:55+00:00

1st Jul 2009 10:31

We have mail connection issue at the moment. Engineers are working on this and hope to have this fixed very soon.

Update 11:50 There is still a problem which we are working on but most customers are connecting now but mail delivery will unfortunately be slow or delayed a this time.

Update 12.55 We believe this is now resolved and while connections may be a slow for a while, things should slowly return to normal.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Slow mail access

2009-06-26T11:52:14+00:00

26th Jun 2009 11:47

Mail access is slow at present. We are working to resolve this issue.

Update 12:88 We believe things are now getting back to normal but we will continue to monitor the situation.

Rebooting LCH server47

2009-06-01T14:15:15+00:00

1st Jun 2009 14:14

We are rebooting this machine because of a software failure. It should be back up shortly.

Drive failure on server39

2009-05-29T09:03:40+00:00

29th May 2009 09:01

Unfortunately we are going to have to take LCH Server39 down for maintenance today to replace a faulty drive. We don't know yet when we will be able to do this, but will update this message when we have a time. We hope that the downtime will be around 30 minutes or less.

Update 11:46 We are taking this server down now and hope to have it back up in around 30 minutes or so.

Update 12:28 This server is now back up.

problem with LCH server39

2009-05-29T01:08:50+00:00

29th May 2009 01:08

We have a problem on this machine and are currently rebooting it. It should be back up in around 20 minutes.

Slow connection to mailservers

2009-05-28T12:35:16+00:00

28th May 2009 12:32

Unfortunately customers are finding slow or interrupted connections to the mailservers. There are a number of possible causes for this which we are urgently investigating now. We hope to have this problem resolved quickly and apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Update 13:04 Mail services are now available again after a 20 minute outage caused by a failure on an authentication server. Unfortunately during the failure the system didn't switch correctly to another server. We apologise to customer for this.

Monday 25th May UK Public Holiday

2009-05-22T15:59:43+00:00

22nd May 2009

There will be no telephone sales or support on Monday 25th of May because it is a UK Public Holiday. Email support will be monitored for urgent service affecting issues.

Change to MX server policy

2009-05-16T12:43:16+00:00

16th May 2009 12:27

Due to the very large amounts of spam mail we are now getting from infected machines on broadband networks (zombies) we will now be blocking all mail that comes directly from IP addresses with no reverse DNS mapping. This should not affect mail from legitimate sources, as any correctly configured mail server will have reverse DNS set up correctly. Most 'end-user' email is normally sent via their ISPs SMTP relay which should be set up correctly. The senders most likely to have problems are those running their own mail servers in small office environments where reverse DNS has not been correctly configured. In these cases they will know that their mail isn't getting through and they should arrange with their provider to get the reverse DNS set up correctly, but if that is a problem we can white-list their IP on request.

Limiting based on reverse DNS is something many ISPs now do because it is a fast way of eliminating mail from most zombie machines, and we are sure it will greatly reduce the amount of spam mail reaching customers.