Service Alerts & Newsletters
In the event of a serious problem, we send out advisories and updates using this Service Alert system. If you would like to be made aware of either upcoming planned maintenance or serious issues, you can subscribe to our alerts list here.
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Recent Alerts
| 02/04/18 09:21 | mail001 Resolved | Resolved |
| I'm pleased to say we've been able to figure out the problem with mail001 server. Turned out to be a software race condition in some housekeeping code. A recursive function was getting stuck in a loop due to a user having an extremely long mail folder name that happened to cause a directory to be precisely 256 characters in length. This was causing it to eventually take all available memory, causing other services to slow down and eventually fail. By Adrian |
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| 02/04/18 08:10 | mail001 Server Problem | Open |
| mail001 has crashed again, and is being rebooted. Obviously, some more investigation is required and possibly some emergency maintenance. Meanwhile, apologies for all those affected. By Adrian |
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| 31/03/18 07:08 | mail001 Rebooted Successfully | Closed |
| One of our back-end mail storage servers had become unresponsive, and has now been rebooted. All services should now be functioning as normal. Apologies to all affected by this. We will try to investigate the cause of the crash, but odds are, we won't be able to find any clues, but at first glance it looks like an OS software glitch. By Adrian |
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| 31/03/18 06:50 | mail001 Reboot | Open |
| One of our back-end mail storage servers has become unresponsive, and is currently being rebooted. By Adrian |
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| 21/03/18 23:38 | Network Issues | Open |
| We've had some reports of connectivity issues tonight to certain providers, and have identified a problem with one of our upstreams that may be causing this. We have just switched off this link so that traffic should re-route through other providers, and have raised the issue with the provider of this connection. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused tonight while we were figuring this out. By Adrian |
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| 13/03/18 12:18 | Happy 10th Birthday syslog001! | Open |
| We thought it shouldn't go without mentioning that one of our servers, syslog001, has now passed it's 10th birthday. That's not just 10 years in service, but 10 years uptime, with no reboot etc. This is a testament to the reliability of the Dell hardware, the power supply in Telehouse and the FreeBSD software that runs on this server. Sadly, it's days are numbered - it has been due a replacement for some time, but as it is a non-essential piece of kit and was nearing it's 10th birthday, we wanted to give it a chance to make it all the way. So, happy birthday syslog001, and thanks for all the logs! By Adrian |
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| 05/03/18 20:20 | SSL Upgrades | Open |
| Tonight we are performing some upgrades on our Proxy servers to ensure we're running the latest and greatest versions of SSL. This work should go largely unnoticed, but it's possible some users running really old systems will have compatibility issues as a result. Please let us know if you come across any issues, and we'll do our best to resolve - but in many cases it may just be time for those users to finally upgrade their own systems. By Adrian |
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| 06/02/18 14:24 | Service Alert: Server Upgrade - zimbra002 - tomorrow (Wed 7th Feb) | Open |
| REMINDER: We will be upgrading our zimbra002 server to Zimbra 8.7 tomorrow night, with work commencing at 10pm. We will endeavour to minimise any disruption to service, and any inbound email received whilst each server is offline will be queued until the relevant server is live again. By Iain |
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| 30/01/18 14:11 | Server Upgrade: zimbra003 - tomorrow (Wed 31st Jan) | Open |
| REMINDER: After being delayed for a week we will be upgrading our zimbra003 server to Zimbra 8.7 tomorrow night, with work commencing at 10pm. We will endeavour to minimise any disruption to service, and any inbound email received whilst each server is offline will be queued until the relevant server is live again. By Iain |
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| 16/01/18 16:58 | Server Upgrade: zimbra004 - tomorrow (Wed 17th) | Open |
| REMINDER: We will be upgrading our zimbra004 server to Zimbra 8.7 tomorrow night, with work commencing at 10pm. We will endeavour to minimise any disruption to service, and any inbound email received whilst each server is offline will be queued until the relevant server is live again. By Iain |
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| 19/12/17 14:40 | Zimbra Upgrades in New Year | Open |
| Important - Zimbra Upgrades As part of our ongoing programme of service enhancements, we will be performing upgrade work on our Zimbra servers during the month of January. This work will be undertaken outside of normal working hours (in the evening) and will involve a period of downtime for each server. We will endeavour to minimise any disruption to service and any inbound email received whilst each server is offline will be queued until the relevant server is live again. The dates will be as follows - we will be sending reminders beforehand. Wednesday 17th Jan: Zimbra004 - upgrade to Zimbra 8.7 Wednesday 24th Jan: Zimbra003 - upgrade to Zimbra 8.7 Wednesday 31st Jan: Zimbra002 - upgrade to Zimbra 8.7 Whilst Zimbra 8.8 has just been released, we want to monitor it over the coming months to ensure stability. Once satisfied that it will be reliable we will upgrade to that version. We haven't forgotten Zimbra001 and will contact customers on this server about moving users in the New Year. If you have any questions please let us know. By Iain |
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| 25/10/17 14:13 | Major Proxy Server Issues - Update | Ongoing |
| Latest update on this. Everything should now be back up and running properly. We've managed to patch some software to control the connections coming in on POP3 over SSL so that another attack on that port shouldn't overload the servers. We will, of course, continue to watch closely! By Adrian |
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| 25/10/17 13:16 | Major Proxy Server Issues | Ongoing |
| It looks like we've suffered from some sort of attack against our proxy servers, which has unfortunately resulted in the need to reboot them. This process is underway at the moment, and we hope to have services restored shortly. We are currently blocking some POP3S services, as this is the source of the attack, we believe, and we will look to restore these as soon as we can. Please accept our apologies and be assured we're working hard to restore service and figure out how we can prevent a recurrence. By Adrian |
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| 24/10/17 19:21 | Proxy Server Issues | Ongoing |
| We're having some sporadic performance issues with one of our proxy servers. This is causing logins for IMAP/POP3/Webmail etc to fail for some people from time to time - effectively a series of brown-outs that have been occurring throughout the day and lasting 1-5 minutes at a time. After much investigation, we've managed to track it down to someone trying to brute force crack some users passwords via a POP3S connection. Unfortunately they're doing this with thousands of connections from approx 800 different IP addresses in the space of a minute, which is what is causing the server to overload. We're currently trying to assess the best way to deal with it, but please be assured we are looking into it and hope to have some kind of protection in place shortly to prevent it recurring. By Adrian |
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| 17/10/17 17:39 | Zimbra004 Server - PSU Issue (Continued) | Open |
| From approximately 7pm tomorrow evening (Wednesday 18th October) we will be performing a cold reboot of the server, as we perform further work to fix ongoing issues with the Power Supply Units (PSUs). This will impact all users of Zimbra mailboxes on this server as there will be up to 10 minutes of downtime. We will endeavour to keep downtime to an absolute minimum, but the work is required to ensure that zimbra004 remains a robust performer going forward. Any inbound mail will be queued and everything should return to normal, without intervention, following the reboot. By Iain |
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| 13/10/17 13:13 | Zimbra004 Server - PSU Change | Open |
| From approximately 7pm this evening (or shortly thereafter) we will be swapping out a faulty Power Supply Unit (PSU) on our Zimbra004 server. We do not expect any impact, or outage, to the service. By Iain |
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| 29/09/17 16:35 | CEO Spam | Resolved |
| We've seen an influx of what is known as 'CEO Spam', where an email is supposedly sent from the boss' iPhone asking the recipient to urgently send some money to a bank account. Please be on the alert for this, and help your users not to fall for what is quite a clever scam. Meanwhile, we are just in the process of adding a rule to our anti-spam software to hopefully block all of these - this will only work if your users are using our anti-spam system, of course! By Adrian |
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| 07/07/17 15:39 | verygoodemail.com SSL Certificate Renewal | Open |
| We're just renewing the SSL certificate for verygoodemail.com. This will be rolled out onto the Zimbra servers on Monday evening (10/07). Based on our recent experience with renewing apm-internet.net certificate, any partners using their own domain and pointing at a Zimbra server might have issues with iPhone users and SSL. There are only two possible solutions to this. 1) Change the config to point at verygoodemail.com instead of your own domain, and 2) De-configure and re-configure the mail client on the iPhone. Apologies for any inconvenience that may be caused by this Apple bug. By Adrian |
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| 27/06/17 10:42 | SSL Issue With iPhones | Ongoing |
| An update on this. It can be fixed by deleting the account on the iPhone/iPad etc, and re-adding it. That will keep things running for approx 3 years - at which time we'll need to renew the certificate again and it'll all break once more - unless Apple have fixed something by then. By Adrian |
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| 27/06/17 09:24 | SSL Issue With iPhones | Ongoing |
| Following the disruption yesterday with the expiry of the *.apm-internet.net SSL certificate, we renewed the certificate last night. However, for partners who are using their own domain but don't have their own SSL certificate set up, this appears to be causing problems for iPhone users. Because the domain of the certificate does not match the domain the users are connecting to, the iPhone is complaining. In the past, iPhones allowed you to accept this, but it would appear that Apple have removed this functionality and they are now complaining. The simplest route around this is for the users to change their server settings to point at mail.overssl.net - this works for POP3, IMAP and SMTP. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused by all of this! By Adrian |
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