Server and System Status

We’ve had reports from Blackberry users with different networks on different continents that they are unable to access email on their domains hosted with NinerNet via their Blackberry devices. We’re still looking into this issue to determine if the problem is on our end or with the Blackberry / Research in Motion (RIM, the Blackberry company) systems. Based on our understanding of the relationship between Blackberry/RIM and individual network carriers, this is probably not an issue with the carriers themselves. However, we don’t know whether or not individual subscribers are able to contact Blackberry/RIM directly for support.

In the meantime, we’ve been informed by one client that they were able to regain access to their email account through their Blackberry by changing their configuration to use IMAP on port 143 and a non-SSL connection. If this issue is affecting you, please try this.

We are interested in feedback and diagnostic information on this issue from clients. If you are able to send us copies of error messages or information directly from Blackberry/RIM (the company) support or your carrier, we would appreciate it. Thanks.

We’ll post updates here as we work on this issue.

We’ve had the following response from AOL to our query about incoming email from AOL addresses being bounced back to the senders:

We had few issues with our Outbound IP’s timing out with few mail servers last week. Are you still seeing reports of our users not able to connect to your servers? Please send me the headers and I can check the logs at our end. With regards to Spam Flag Yes- we are seeing lots of AOL accounts being compromised forcing us to send mails through our aberrant IP’s. These mails might be rejected at our end too if we suspect compromise but do issue a bounce message.

This would seem to indicate that AOL has solved the issue of legitimate email sent to NinerNet clients being returned as undeliverable. We’ve had no reports of incoming email from AOL senders being bounced for over a week now, so we’ll consider this matter closed.

While we have not heard from AOL yet, in recent experiments all email from AOL got through. However, these experiments were on a very small scale, so may not accurately reflect reality.

Domains hosted by Realtime appear to be back up again after being down for about five days. That email backlog has been cleared.

Email to the iwayafrica.com domain appears to be having problems. There isn’t much of this backlogged on the mail servers, but there is some. Same with a couple of domains hosted by Coppernet.

If you’re trying to communicate with people with unreliable email, why not refer them to NinerNet? We pay referral fees!

We have had some reports of incoming email from AOL users being bounced back to the senders. After some extensive research over the last few days we believe we have managed to address this problem, adjusting the configuration of one of our anti-spam measures (greylisting) to allow for the fact that AOL’s handling of outbound email doesn’t play well with greylisting.

If you are a NinerNet client and have any reports from correspondents with AOL email addresses indicating that email from them to you has been returned as undeliverable, please contact support.

Update 2010-06-15 07:28 UTC: Apparently this issue has not yet been resolved. We contacted AOL yesterday to find out why some of their mail servers are bouncing email prematurely and without reason, but their auto-response says it could take seven days or more for them to respond, it at all. We will post updates as they become available.

Clients sending email to domains hosted by Realtime are advised that messages to these domains have been backing up on our mail servers over the weekend, and are still not being delivered. A cursory analysis would seem to indicate that there is a routing problem at or near the Realtime mail servers. If you have concerns about this, please contact the intended recipients via a medium other than email and have them contact Realtime for an explanation.

Update 2010-06-15 07:26 UTC: This issue seems to be ongoing. Domains hosted by Realtime appear to be down still, and email to them continues to be queued on our mail servers.