Server and System Status

NC036: Scheduled mail server maintenance

6 March 2020 10:41:18 +0000

During this weekend’s maintenance window we will be adding hard drive storage to server NC036 to continue to provide more storage space for a growing number of growing email accounts. This maintenance is scheduled to start at 19:00 UTC and we anticipate it will last less than one hour.

During the maintenance the ability to send and receive email will not be available, both via standalone email programs (e.g., Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.) and the webmail. Incoming email will be queued on the sending servers until our server is back online again, after which it will then be delivered to our server and your email account. This may result in a delay longer than the planned hour of the maintenance though.

Please monitor this status page to be notified of the start and end of the maintenance. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact NinerNet support.

Thank-you for your patience as we continue to work to improve our services to you.

Tags: down time, email delivery, mail server, smtp, webmail
Categories: Email, Maintenance, NC036
3 Comments »

Mail server latency issue resolved

30 September 2019 23:25:22 +0000

This issue on server NC036 appears to have been resolved, although we are awaiting official confirmation from the data centre. Should there be no change of status this issue will be closed with no further update here.

As always though, if you have any issues or concerns please contact support. Thank-you for your patience.

Tags: email, email delivery, mail, mail server, webmail
Categories: Email, Incidents, NC036
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Email server (NC036) latency issue

30 September 2019 22:28:56 +0000

We are aware that connections to the primary mail server (NC036) are slow to the point they are timing out. We are told by the data centre where this server is located that this is an infrastructure issue of which they are aware and on which they are actively working.

We apologise for this temporary inconvenience. We will post further updates here as necessary or when the issue has been resolved. In the meantime, if you have any questions or concerns, please contact support. Thank-you.

Tags: email, email delivery, mail, mail server, webmail
Categories: Email, Incidents, NC036
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NC036: Reboot complete

16 July 2019 20:47:38 +0000

The reboot of server NC036 is complete. It was offline for about sixty seconds.

Tags: down time, email delivery, mail server, smtp, webmail
Categories: Email, Maintenance, NC036
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NC036: Reboot

16 July 2019 20:35:26 +0000

We will be rebooting server NC036 (the primary mail server) in a few minutes to apply updates.

Tags: down time, email delivery, mail server, smtp, webmail
Categories: Email, Maintenance, NC036
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NC036: Scheduled mail server maintenance

7 June 2019 16:00:22 +0000

Please monitor this status page to be notified of the start and end of the maintenance. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact NinerNet support.

Thank-you for your patience as we continue to work to improve our services to you.

Tags: down time, email delivery, mail server, smtp, webmail
Categories: Email, Maintenance, NC036
1 Comment »

NC036: Scheduled mail server maintenance

14 December 2018 07:03:01 +0000

Please monitor this status page to be notified of the start and end of the maintenance. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact NinerNet support.

Thank-you for your patience as we continue to work to improve our services to you.

Tags: down time, email delivery, mail server, smtp, webmail
Categories: Email, Maintenance, NC036
1 Comment »

NC036: Mail server blocked by Microsoft

14 December 2018 05:33:38 +0000

We are aware that the IP address of server NC036 (the primary mail server) has again been blocked by Microsoft’s various mail services, variously known as Outlook.com, MSN, Hotmail, Live.com, etc.

Although we are a member of their Smart Network Data Services programme and Junk Mail Reporting Program, which are supposed to allow us to proactively prevent these kinds of issues, we have been unable to use the service as advertised, or at least as we understand it’s supposed to work. We will continue to attempt to have this server’s IP address removed from their blacklist, and report here when we have success.

In the meantime, outgoing mail to their primary domains (hotmail.ca, hotmail.com, hotmail.co.uk, live.com, msn.com and outlook.com) is being routed through our relay server. If you receive a bounce message that reads similarly the one below to an email you’ve sent, it is probably for a private domain hosted by Microsoft of which we are not aware. Please contact us and we will add it to the list of domains for which email is routed through our relay server:

host 901e3cd0af6f44ab11b5a5e8a49da3.pamx1.hotmail.com[104.47.0.33] said: 550
5.7.1 Unfortunately, messages from [178.62.195.26] weren’t sent. Please
contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on
our block list (S3140). You can also refer your provider to
http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors.
[HE1EUR01FT033.eop-EUR01.prod.protection.outlook.com] (in reply to MAIL
FROM command)

Please remember that all email you send through our mail server must be to recipients with whom you already have a business or personal relationship, and all mass email must be explicitly requested — i.e., Confirmed opt-in (COI) or Double opt-in (DOI) email.

Thanks for your cooperation, and our apologies for this inconvenience.

Tags: email delivery, mail relay, mail server, microsoft, spam
Categories: Email, Incidents, NC036
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NC036: Migration update 25 — Final

18 June 2018 08:54:43 +0000

The migration of all email accounts from server NC027 to server NC036 is complete. In fact, it was successfully completed at 04:00 UTC on 4 June. What followed over the next few days was an unprecedented avalanche of misinformation and red herrings that resulted in our moving the new server to another data centre (a move that took ten times longer than the previous move from the data centre where NC027 was located) where the same “problems” experienced by only some of our clients magically reappeared.

We planned the migration to have absolutely no impact on existing email configurations. We did this by pointing legacy sub-domains of the niner.net domain that named server NC027 — e.g., smtp27.niner.net — to server NC036. At the conclusion of the migration these sub-domains were indeed pointing to the new server. In other words, on Monday morning (4 June) email programs would have thought they were still downloading mail from the same server, not realising (or needing to realise) that they were in fact downloading from a new server.

However, it turned out that a significant minority of email programs were somehow misconfigured with settings that worked on the old server, but stopped working when connecting to the new server. Those clients who were using the correct settings experienced no disruption at all, and when those clients with incorrect settings corrected them on the morning of Monday the 11th, the problems were fixed instantly.

Over the rest of that week (11-15 June) we helped a few clients with some issues unique to how they use email, especially where those practices clashed with current best practices for email transmission. We also dealt with some issues of senders whose mail servers were behaving improperly, causing their emails to be blocked because they looked like spammers. This notably affected email from the ZRA, but their emails are once again flowing unimpeded.

We’re monitoring the spam filtering on the new server. Any message that the server identifies as spam will have the subject of the message prefixed to add “[SPAM]“. You can use this to configure your email program or the webmail to deal with spam automatically, by filtering it into your “junk” folder or deleting it entirely. We recommend filtering to the junk folder so that you can catch the occasional legitimate message that is misclassified as spam.

Finally, in recognition of the fact that the emergency migration of the server to a new data centre on 6 June disrupted all clients’ email, and the fact that those clients with misconfigured email programs experienced a week of disruption before the issue was identified, we will be applying a one-week (quarter month) credit to the accounts of all clients hosted on server NC036. We apologise for the difficulties caused, and will apply what was learned this time to future migrations.

Thank-you, as always, for your custom and patience.

Tags: connection issues, down time, email delivery, mail server, migration, spam
Categories: Email, Incidents, NC027, NC036
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NC036: Migration update 22 — A word about forwarding email

11 June 2018 08:36:59 +0000

Over the years we’ve noticed that a certain percentage of our clients are in the habit of forwarding all of their email to external free webmail services — e.g., Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc. Why do we even notice this? Well, because these free services often delay your email, and so it queues on our server for anywhere between minutes and days. There are complicated reasons for this, but once you realise that you’re not the only one forwarding your email, you can see how these free webmail services might decide to limit the number of messages that they accept from our servers. This is especially noticeable when (not if) a few spams get through and (ironically) the receivers — the very NinerNet clients who have configured their email accounts here to forward to their free webmail provider — complain to the free webmail provider about the spam by clicking the convenient “this is spam” button. The free provider then responds by blocking or limiting mail from our server, making the reporting of the spam by the NinerNet client self-defeating!

Among other reasons, what people who do this are running into here is introducing multiple points of failure. If a message arrives on the NinerNet mail server, it’s made it! It has arrived where it was intended by the sender to be delivered. But now you’ve told our server to forward it somewhere else. It’s like telling a runner at the finish line that he has to do the same race again. And the runner might not make it the second time, just as your email might not make it into your Gmail account.

Right now there are a few dozen emails queued on our server waiting to be accepted by these free email services. Given that some of them have been queued for several days, most of them will likely bounce back to the senders within the next few hours. There is nothing unusual about this; we see it all the time, and it has little (if anything) to do with the mail server migration.

If webmail is your preferred way of accessing your email, we do (obviously) provide webmail on your own domain. (And non-Gmail webmail these days is way better than it used to be!) If you prefer the webmail offered by your free provider of choice, that’s fine, as long as you’re aware of the inherent risks of delayed and bounced email if you choose to forward everything.

If you’d like to discuss alternatives to forwarding your email, let us know and we can provide options to you or address any concerns you may have.

Tags: email delivery, mail server, spam
Categories: Email
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System	Status	Ping
NC023	Internal	Up?
NC028	Internal	Up?
NC031	Internal	Up?
NC033	Operational	Up?
NC034	Internal	Up?
NC035	Operational	Up?
NC036	Operational	Up?
NC040	Internal	Up?
NC041	Operational	Up?
NC042	Operational	Up?