I have not moved the niner.net email to a new server yet, because I have to leave our domain on the degraded server, NC036, so that I can communicate with those of you who have not moved yet.
And it turns out, there are a lot of you!
I am going to send an email to all of you, to an address on the NinerNet mail server — because if I send it to any other external address it won’t be delivered — to ask you how I can help you move your email hosting.
I am, as I have said, sorry that things have come to pass in this way. There was a plan, to be executed in May 2025, but this was not it, and the old plan can no longer be executed. NinerNet is … almost … dead.
As such, the old servers can no longer be kept running indefinitely. This means we will shut down the old mail server (NC036) on or after midnight UTC on 18 April 2026 (17:00 Pacific on Friday the 17th, 02:00 CAT, and 08:00 AWST). “On or after” means, quite clearly, that you can’t expect that server (NC036) to be operational after that date and time. We may (and probably will) not shut down the server at exactly 00:01, but every second the server is running after 00:00 on 18 April 2026 UTC will be bonus time for you to do whatever you need to do (such as make a back-up copy of your email) with your email on our server.
We do not have a date by which we will be shutting down our Web and DNS servers. They will continue to operate for the immediate future, but not forever. We also suggest that you do what is necessary to save your websites, but the urgency is less than is the case for the mail server.
We are currently renewing domain registrations as they come up for renewal at our own expense. This includes dot-zam.co and dot-zm domains. Once we have our own email on a new and working server, we will email domain registrants to assist them with transfers. We will, however, come up with a plan for dot-zam.co and dot-zm registrants, probably involving a new registrar.
Backing up your email
Please consult with your new host on how they might assist you to recover old email from the NinerNet server using IMAP to copy your old email to your new server. I did this just yesterday for a former client, and it took just about a minute to recover several hundred messages. IMAP stands for “Internet Message Access Protocol”; as such, there is no way for you to download some sort of file over the Web, since IMAP is an email protocol. Even if you have several thousand emails saved on our server, it will only take a few minutes to transfer them across.
You can also use a feature of a proper email program to download a copy of your old messages. Different email programs use different terminology, so look for the following features:
- Save to file,
- Back up,
- Offline usage,
- Etc.
It is IMPORTANT to note, that just because you are able to, and have been, opening your email program for the last month (or ten years) and seeing your messages as normal, that does NOT mean the messages are saved on your computer. What you are seeing is a window into what is on the server, and as long as the server is there, you will continue to see that. When we turn off the server, you will see nothing. Please make sure you take action now to save your part of the 2.9 TB saved on our server.
ONCE IT’S GONE, IT’S GONE. There’s no getting it back.
We will shortly be emailing all clients with email still on server NC036. It needs to be moved by this Friday, 18 April 2026.
