NinerNet Communications™
System Status

Server and System Status

NC036: Conclusion of issue with suspended Windows-based email account and SMTP2GO

16 July 2025 06:34:23 +0000

We were contacted by SMTP2GO late in the morning of the 15th. We weren’t given any more specific information about this particular issue, so we have to assume that this is a new, more proactive approach to preventing spam outbreaks. In our experience, a party that has compromised an email account they intend to use to send spam will sometimes send an initial test message from the account, and that message (if the body can be seen) can be recognised and acted on. We don’t have any easily accessible examples, but the few we have seen essentially identify the compromised account and provide the account’s password. The initiator of that message might be an automated process, or it might be a human. Regardless, if that message is seen the intent is fairly obvious, and the recipient then acts on it by using (and sometimes modifying, as we’ve noted before) the account however they intended to use it.

So I’m not very impressed that they immediately shut down our SMTP account based on one suspicious message, but I am thankful that our account with them allows us to reactivate it. So we reactivated it after disabling the one NinerNet-hosted compromised email account, and none of our clients (except the owner of the compromised account) were affected. Now that we know that we won’t overreact when or if this happens again.

It’s important to note here that we actually have the ability to communicate with SMTP2GO, who provide us the ability to communicate with intelligent, thinking humans who understand how email works and understand that providers like NinerNet do the very best that we can to prevent spam from emanating from our network, but that we are not 100% successful 100% of the time. This stands in stark contrast to providers like Outlook/Hotmail/Microsoft/whatever, Gmail, Yahoo, etc., who all act as if they own the planet and are answerable to nobody … including their own customers whom they inconvenience with their arrogant, scornful and contemptuous attitudes. You don’t actually see that yourself 99% of the time if you’re one of their users, of course — it’s all sunshine and light from their marketing departments — but it’s a painfully known fact amongst small providers like NinerNet who are shunted out of the way, downtrodden and treated like trash.

The point of this separate post (rather than a second update to the last post) is to highlight the excellent behaviour of SMTP2GO. It’s not often in this business that we send good vibes to a supplier, but SMTP2GO deserve any good vibes they get. If they provide any services that you need we couldn’t recommend them more strongly.

NC036: Windows email account suspension

15 July 2025 03:55:05 +0000

This announcement is not about our suspending a Windows-based email account, but the fact that an errant Windows-hosted email account belonging to one of our clients temporarily caused the suspension of an account we maintain with a supplier through which a substantial number of our outbound email messages are delivered every day — our “relay server“. We are still waiting for feedback from our supplier, but this happened after business hours in the Pacific time zone and in the middle of the night in the Central Africa time zone.

In the meantime we have un-suspended our account with our supplier, as we are certain that this suspension was in error. We do not expect this to affect any outbound email today, but we alert you to it in case there is a problem.

However this turns out we will update this post with the outcome, hopefully very soon. Thank-you for your patience.


Update, 2025-07-15: The relay server people (SMTP2GO) have not even acknowledged our ticket yet, so our hopes for a quick update have been dashed. However, the relay server is working as it should as of this moment. As we said, we believe this suspension was in error, so we’re not expecting it to happen again.

All servers: Company SSL/TLS certificates on all servers renewed and updated

16 January 2025 03:20:54 +0000

The *.niner.net wildcard SSL/TLS certificate has been renewed and updated across our entire infrastructure. This should be seamless for all our clients. However, should you run into a situation in the next 24 hours where you’re told that the certificate has expired, please log out and reload whatever it is you’re trying to do. You may need to reboot, but this would be very unusual. Simply forcing a reload should clear things up. Via FTPS you may need to re-trust our certificate depending on your FTP client.

However, we are aware of unusual behaviour in some email programs, but this does not include Outlook and Thunderbird. We are working to determine the cause of these known problems, and will update this post when we know more.

This doesn’t affect certificates on your own domain on your website, just NinerNet services such as control panels and connecting to the mail and FTP servers.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do contact NinerNet support with any error messages you may be seeing. Thank-you.


Update, 2025-01-16: We’re getting more and more reports of problems. Please reboot your computers/machines/devices. If you are reporting a problem, please advise us of the program you are using. And please also keep in mind that you can use the webmail.

Update 2, 2025-01-16: This problem has finally been resolved. We apologise for the inconvenience. We did test it with Outlook, but apparently some versions of Outlook, other than the one we tested with, had problems. This is an operation that usually take 10-15 minutes once a year and is completed without anyone noticing!

All servers: Company SSL/TLS certificates on all servers renewed and updated

15 January 2024 04:24:46 +0000

The *.niner.net wildcard SSL/TLS certificate has been renewed and updated across our entire infrastructure, although we apologise for being about four hours late. This should be seamless for all our clients. However, should you run into a situation in the next 24 hours where you’re told that the certificate has expired, please log out and reload whatever it is you’re trying to do. You may need to reboot, but this would be very unusual. Simply forcing a reload should clear things up. Via FTPS you may need to re-trust our certificate depending on your FTP client.

This doesn’t affect certificates on your own domain on your website, just NinerNet services such as control panels and connecting to the mail and FTP servers.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do contact NinerNet support with any error messages you may be seeing. Thank-you.

All servers: Company SSL/TLS certificates on all servers renewed and updated

14 January 2023 23:27:28 +0000

The *.niner.net wildcard SSL/TLS certificate has been renewed and updated across our entire infrastructure. This should be seamless for all our clients. However, should you run into a situation in the next 24 hours where you’re told that the certificate has expired, please log out and reload whatever it is you’re trying to do. You may need to reboot, but this would be very unusual. Simply forcing a reload should clear things up. Via FTPS you may need to re-trust our certificate depending on your FTP client.

This doesn’t affect certificates on your own domain on your website, just NinerNet services such as control panels and connecting to the mail and FTP servers.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do contact NinerNet support with any error messages you may be seeing. Thank-you.

All servers: Company SSL/TLS certificates on all servers renewed and updated

14 January 2022 12:26:04 +0000

The *.niner.net wildcard SSL/TLS certificate has been renewed and updated across our entire infrastructure. This should be seamless for all our clients. However, should you run into a situation in the next 24 hours where you’re told that the certificate has expired, please log out and reload whatever it is you’re trying to do. You may need to reboot, but this would be very unusual. Simply forcing a reload should clear things up. Via FTPS you may need to re-trust our certificate depending on your FTP client.

This doesn’t affect certificates on your own domain on your website, just NinerNet services such as control panels and connecting to the mail and FTP servers.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do contact NinerNet support with any error messages you may be seeing. Thank-you.

All servers: SSL certificates updated

14 January 2021 11:30:33 +0000

The *.niner.net SSL certificate was renewed today and updated on all servers.

If you get any certificate errors in either your web browser or email program, please close down all programs, restart your computer, and try again. This should clear the cache of the programs in question and force them to download the new certificate information.

If you have any problems, please contact support. Thank-you.

All servers: SSL certificates updated

16 December 2019 12:18:04 +0000

The *.niner.net SSL certificate was renewed today and updated on all servers.

If you get any certificate errors in either your web browser or email program, please close down all programs, restart your computer, and try again. This should clear the cache of the programs in question and force them to download the new certificate information.

If you have any problems, please contact support. Thank-you.

NinerNet home page

Systems at a Glance:


Loc.SystemStatusPing
Server NC023, London, United Kingdom (Relay server), INTERNAL.NC023InternalUp?
Server NC028, Vancouver, Canada (Monitoring server), INTERNAL.NC028InternalUp?
Server NC031, New York, United States of America (Web server), INTERNAL.NC031InternalUp?
Server NC033, Toronto, Canada (Primary nameserver), OPERATIONAL.NC033OperationalUp?
Server NC034, Lusaka, Zambia (Phone server), INTERNAL.NC034InternalUp?
Server NC035, Sydney, Australia (Secondary nameserver), OPERATIONAL.NC035OperationalUp?
Server NC036, Amsterdam, Netherlands (Mail server), OPERATIONAL.NC036OperationalUp?
Server NC040, Toronto, Canada (Web server), INTERNAL.NC040InternalUp?
Server NC041, New York, United States of America (Web server), OPERATIONAL.NC041OperationalUp?
Server NC042, Seattle, United States of America (Status website), OPERATIONAL.NC042OperationalUp?

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