The Road Ahead

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.

You may have noticed that we had a few a technical issues over the weekend (saturday) that affected our mail services. These issues are now fixed and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.

We suffered a bit of a domino affect. A hard disk error caused a database failure that in turn stopped our mail servers from processing and routing e-mail messages. We were still receiving messages, but they were just building up in a big queue awaiting sorting and delivery. Once the underlying issue had been resolved, all outstanding messages were processed and delivered as normal.

All web hosting and associated services (and their associated databases) were not affected by these issues and continued to operate as normal.