The emergency maintenance on server NC036 earlier today was to add additional disk space for email storage. Normally this maintenance is scheduled in advance, but today a number of factors combined to require us to take action immediately. We will work to avoid this situation in the future, but the cause of the situation was one of the aforementioned factors.
Thank-you for your patience. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact NinerNet support. Thank-you.
Server NC036 is back online. It was down for 6 minutes between 02:31 and 02:37 UTC. We’ll be posting additional information about this shortly.
Server NC036 (our primary mail server) will be undergoing emergency maintenance within the next few minutes. The server will be down for approximately half an hour.
We will post an update when we are done.
As noted in the previous two posts, there was a virus outbreak on server NC036 (the primary mail server) this morning. Apparently the machines associated with five email accounts on three domains were compromised, allowing criminals to use those accounts to send thousands of viruses. These were intercepted by our anti-virus scanner, but due to the volume of activity on the server we had to shut down the SMTP side of the mail server while we determined which email accounts were compromised, suspended them and removed their messages from the mail queue.
Please note that what happens in almost all cases when email accounts are compromised is that the computer (or one of the machines or devices on which those accounts are configured) is what is actually compromised; it is not the server. The account owner’s machine is usually infected with a virus or other malware, and the account’s password is then transmitted to the criminals behind the virus. They then launch an attack via the legitimate and correct password. It’s as if your car was stolen and the thief used it to commit a crime; the car behaved as it was told by the guy with the key, but is not responsible for the crime. On the other hand, the owner of the car may have left the key in their car and the door unlocked, contributing to the compromise. This is why it is vitally important that you have anti-virus software installed on your computer, and kept up-to-date.
If you have any questions about this, please feel free to contact NinerNet support, and we’ll be happy to answer your questions or concerns. Our apologies for the interruption.
Our apologies. The sending side of the mail server (NC036) is back up. It was down for 21 minutes between 06:56 and 07:17 UTC. The ability to check your email account was not down.
We will post additional information and contact the affected clients shortly.
Server NC036 (the primary mail server) is temporarily paused while we clean up a huge virus outbreak. I will be back online as soon as possible.
Microsoft are famous for ignoring standards and inventing their own so-called standards, and over the years we’ve seen evidence of that in Outlook.
Numerous clients today report that the following applies to Outlook, at least Outlook 2016:
There is no option for STARTTLS for incoming (POP/IMAP) settings. As such, you need to use the older and deprecated option of using port 995 (POP) and 993 (IMAP) over SSL.
Here are the promised screenshots that show how an email program like Thunderbird should be configured.
We will have Outlook screenshots available as soon as possible.
We suspect that clients having problems sending or receiving email have very old legacy configuration settings. Please see the “Email server settings” section below for the definitively correct settings.
Over the weekend we took a deep breath and stepped back to re-analyse this problem, and consult with a number of you. Between…
.. we were awash in red herrings to an extent I have never seen in 22 years.
We’ve taken a look at the behaviour of two of the most used email programs (Thunderbird and Outlook) and come to some conclusions about what might be happening:
So, if you’re having problems sending, it will likely be worth your while to check your SMTP (outgoing) settings; if you’re having problems receiving, it will likely be worth your time to check your POP or IMAP (incoming) settings. I wanted to have some screenshots ready for this post, but I’d rather get the words up now and post screenshots shortly afterwards, so here are the settings you need to use:
I can’t emphasise strongly enough how important it is for you to be precise in setting up this configuration. No setting is “close enough”, and your computer is not smart enough to figure it out; it will just tell you there is an error. Although, having said that, I’d like to emphasise that the niner.net sub-domains with “27” in them — i.e., pop27.niner.net, imap27.niner.net and smtp27.niner.net — do still also work, but they will be phased out; do not use them.
In the case of those email programs that like to railroad you into sending all email through a single SMTP account by default, we suggest that you start with a clean slate there too by deleting all of the saved SMTP accounts (unless you have some on systems that are completely separate from NinerNet) and creating a new one for each of your email accounts. Because your email program may not let you delete the “default” SMTP account, you’ll need to make a new SMTP account the new default, and then delete the old default.
We will post helpful screenshots as soon as possible. In the meantime, please check (and, if necessary, update) your email account settings and ensure that they are correct.
Thank-you.
I have just got off the phone with someone in IT security at MTN head office in Lusaka, and they confirm that they have been blocking our new mail server as part of a wrong-headed plan to prevent MTN users from sending spam. It is likely that the first new mail server was also being actively blocked. He says that our IP addresses will be unblocked within the next ten minutes.
This raises the significant question of whether or not this is now an Africa-wide policy with many other ISPs. Other countries manage to prevent their users from sending spam without holding the keys to a gateway to the Internet, forcing companies like NinerNet to supplicate themselves to the likes of big companies like MTN when we find our businesses held hostage.
This is why we sent the questionnaire out yesterday asking you for details on whether nor not you are still having problems, and for the details of your ISP. Please reply to those emails so that we may determine which ISPs are actively blocking our servers and take the appropriate action.
| Loc. | 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? |
