Server and System Status

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.

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.