Server and System Status

Just about a month ago we became aware of the problem with delivering email to Microsoft-hosted domains. At that time, one of the actions we took was to pay to have our mail server’s IP address listed in the UCEPROTECT whitelist that effectively removed our IP address from a huge list of blacklisted IP addresses that are only listed because of the lackadaisical approach of our data centre (Digital Ocean) to removing spammers from their network of data centres.

We weren’t certain at the time that this action would achieve anything and, to be frank, we have no concrete evidence to believe that our doing so has had the desired effect. We think there is strong evidence that it has, but there is no way we can determine that definitively. The strong evidence is that we have had very few problems with mail to Microsoft-hosted domains since a couple of days after the problem started on 20 June.

Our subscription to this whitelist expires on Monday the 22nd. To test the effectiveness of this subscription we are going to allow it to lapse. If we see a sudden uptick in email messages to Microsoft-hosted domains bouncing then we’ll take that as evidence that the subscription is working, and we’ll immediately renew it. In that case, messages you send to such domains will bounce temporarily, so please forward those bounce messages to NinerNet support and we will immediately divert future messages to those domains via our secondary outbound mail servers. This is a temporary and planned test; if these bounces happen it is not evidence that our systems are failing for any reason. If they don’t bounce then we will have learned that our paying for the listing is a waste of money.

The purpose of this message is to let you know of this test in advance. We expect that if messages start bouncing again and we renew the subscription, everything will be back to normal within about 24 hours, and immediately for domains we add to our mail server configuration to have messages go out via our secondary mail server. That said, we have also found that retrying if you get a bounce in this situation sometimes succeeds! It’s bizarre.

Thank-you for your continued patience with issues like this thrown at us by massive providers that don’t care about you, people who choose to host with their competitors.