The Road Ahead

We will be performing essential maintenance work to our mail services tonight (24 April 2015) between 22:00 and 06:00. During that time, access to our mail services may be interrupted or otherwise impaired. Due to the nature of the work, all standard mail services will be affected including Webmail.

This work only applies to our standard mail accounts. Hosted Exchange users will not be affected.

Access to our helpdesk (/support/helpdesk/) will be unaffected with this work.

Update 23:25

The maintenance and upgrade work has been successfully completed. As there were a few DNS changes - changes to domain names - there may still be some intermittent disruption for the next couple of hours.

We have recently revised and updated the anti-virus and anti-malware scanning that we perform on all incoming messages for our standard mail accounts.

As before, any message (including attachments) that is detected as containing a virus or malware will automatically and irrevocably be deleted. This entire process occurs before the offending message is delivered to the recipient's inbox.

If a virus or malware is detected, our mail servers will also send a notification message to the intended recipient. This notification includes key information like the sender's address and the message's subject. As many infected messages may also be considered to be spam, the notification message may end up in your mailbox's SPAM folder.

As we cannot guarantee that our antivirus scanners will intercept every infected message, we strongly urge all of customers to install antivirus software on their PCs. There are a substantial range of antivirus/security software providers - AVG, Avast, Eset, Mcafee to name but a few - many of whom offer a free* versions of their antivirus products.

* Software licence conditions and limitations will vary - please check with supplier.

Following a number of recent requests and enquiries, we've added a knowledgebase article containing a step-by-step guide on how to backup our standard POP3/IMAP email accounts using Broobles IMAPSize.

KB135 Backing up Mail Account using IMAPSize.

To improve our customer's experience, we now issue mailbox usage alerts for all standard mail accounts. If a mailbox is over 90% usage, a warning message will automatically be sent to the mailbox.

Managing mailboxes can be a bit of an art form, especially once you reach several thousand messages. Our knowledgebase contains hints, tips and guides on managing mailboxes as well as other mail-related support articles.

We're currently experiencing problems with the database that powers our primary mail server and webmail. We are actively looking into this and aim to restore normal service as soon as possible.

This problem only affects our standard mail services. Hosted Microsoft Exchange and Web Hosting along with any associated database are unaffected.

Update 16:00

The issue was traced to a corrupt database file. This has been successfully repaired and all mail services restored.