The Road Ahead

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.

The software we use for our hosting control panel, WebsitePanel, is currently misbehaving when changing mail account passwords. Sometime it changes them, other times it does not. We're currently looking into this and hope to get it resolved soon.

If you have attempted to change your mail account password through the hosting control panel, and it hasn't worked, please contact our support team who will change it for you.

Last night, we performed maintenance and upgrade to our core mail services. As a result, there are some changes to our mail services.

Service Upgrade

The core part of the work undertaken last night was the upgrading the software of our mail servers. The software upgrade was successful and all mail services resumed normal operation at around 23:00 last night.

E-mail Virus Scanning

All messages that pass through our servers are automatically scanned for viruses. Any message that contains in which a virus is detected is automatically deleted. We cannot guarantee our virus scanning to be foolproof, so we alway recommend that all of our customer utilises Antivirus protection on their computers as well.

Blocked E-mail Attachments

We automatically block e-mail attachments with particular filename extensions. In most cases, the blocked extensions are files that can cause harm if they are opened or downloaded. We've recently updated and expanded the list of blocked file extensions which take immediate effect.

Forthcoming Work

In the near future (date to be decided), we will be upgrading our webmail software. As with nearly all software upgrades there will be a short period period when webmail will be offline as we switch to the new software.

At the beginning of January we made a few changes to our spam or junk mail filters. Although there have been great strides in dealing with spammers, around 57% of messages received by our servers are identified as being spam.

Although we do intercept and delete a substantial proportion of spam before it is even delivered to individual customer mailboxes, there are some messages that do not quite meet the automatic deletion threshold. These messages are readily identifiable as our filters insert the text [SPAM] into the message's subject.

To make life a little simpler, we've made a small change to all mailboxes. From the beginning of 2013, any spam message that is delivered to a mailbox will now be placed within a new SPAM folder. As there is the possibility that a valid message may be identified as being spam - a false-positive - we recommend that all customers check the contents of the spam folder regularly.

This change only affects our standard mailbox customers. Customers with Hosted Exchange mailboxes have a different spam filtering system.

For more information, please read the knowledgebase article Where is my spam or junk mail.