Posts Tagged ‘e-mail’

Emails erroneously flagged as spam

Wednesday, November 24th, 2021

Between yesterday Tue 23rd Nov 07:27 and tonight Wed 24th Nov 01:48 several hundred emails have erroneously been flagged as spam by our mail server. Please check your SpamBox folder for potential false positives during that period.

While we are constantly updating our filtering rules to catch the nasty spam, we are always doing our best to avoid flagging real emails as spam. We apologize for this and are still investigating the details of the root cause. Because the bulk of the messages were being correctly delivered, it took us several hours before we noticed the problem and could fix it.

Hardware Maintenance Downtime of Mail Server Today 5pm

Thursday, July 2nd, 2015

In order to perform system-level maintenance work, we schedule a maintenance downtime of the D-PHYS mail server today (Thursday, 2nd of July 2015) starting at 17:00. We expect the downtime to take about one hour.

During the downtime all mail services (sending mail, receiving mail, accessing mailboxes, webmail, etc.) will be unavailable. Mails sent to D-PHYS users during the downtime will be held back on the sending side and will be delivered after the downtime.

We will post an update as soon as mail services are back.

Update 19:30: Took a little bit longer than expected, but everything is back to normal now.

Server Maintenances this Week: E-Mail and BackupPC

Tuesday, June 17th, 2014

We have scheduled a software maintenance of the D-PHYS mail server for tomorrow, Wednesday, the 18th of June 2014, starting in the late afternoon around 5pm. A downtime of all D-PHYS mail services during the evening will be part of the maintenance. The downtime is expected to take approximately 15 to 30 minutes.

During the downtime sending and receiving e-mails will not be possible and the web mail service will be not available. Incoming mails during the downtime will be delayed.

Additionally there will be a downtime of our "BackupPC" backup service for laptops and lab PCs due to server relocation on Thursday (19th of June 2014) starting around 9am.

Some incoming mails lost between Jan 9, 6pm and Jan 13, 11am

Tuesday, January 14th, 2014

On Monday morning we found out that large incoming mails (1 MBytes or larger) were dropped without leaving any error messages in our log files. These mails were lost between Thursday (Jan 9) evening 18:27 and Monday (Jan 13) morning 11:06. Some indicators (i.e. spam filter rules for this case) lead us to estimate the number of about 560 broken local deliveries to about 300 unique recipients.

If you expected e-mails with attachments close to 1 MB or larger within this time frame there is a high likelihood that they got lost. The only information we still have about these mails are sender, recipient and arrival date and time. If you were one of these recipients, please contact the sender to send it again.

You can check on this web page if mails you should have received were lost. You'll have to log in with your D-PHYS account and will see sender (or mailing list) of and time when the lost mail arrived. Additionally we'll inform all affected recipients individually, too.

The problem occured after one of the software updates on Thursday which brought stricter code checking, and is solved since Monday morning 11:06.

The issue was caused by a long standing and subtle programming error in the check which prevents bigger mails from being inspected closely by the main spam filter for performance reasons. It was only triggered upon local mail delivery, so mails sent from D-PHYS to outside D-PHYS were not affected. E-mails to D-PHYS mailing lists (or other mailing lists) with archive should be available in the according mailing list archives.

We're truly sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused and have already taken measures so that similar issues won't result in mail loss from now on.

Update: it happens to the best of us: Gmail for iOS bug might cause data loss

Maintenance Downtime of D-PHYS Mail Server on 9-Jan-2014

Monday, January 6th, 2014

On Thursday, the 9th of January 2014, starting in the late afternoon, we will run multiple software updates on the D-PHYS mail server. We do expect multiple downtimes throughout the evening, partially of single mail services, partially of the whole mail server.

This will likely also delay the delivery of incoming mails up to several hours.

Update, 22:30: Everything back to normal.

Short Mail Server Downtime on Friday Late Afternoon

Thursday, May 31st, 2012

We have scheduled a downtime of the D-PHYS mail server for hardware maintenance on Friday, 1st of June 2012, starting after 4pm and lasting approximately half an hour. During the downtime sending and receiving mails will not be possible. Incoming mails will be slightly delayed.

Update 19:30h: Everything back again and looks fine. Performance may be slightly decreased for a day or so until the RAID has rebuilded.

Preparations took longer than expected, so we started later. The maintenance downtime itself also took longer due to some some unexpected issues which had to be resolved before we could continue start all service again. We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Mail Server Maintenance Downtime this Evening

Friday, April 13th, 2012

For some hardware and other maintenance we schedule a downtime of our mail server today (Fri, 13th of April 2012) evening after 6pm.

The downtime will likely take less than one hour. During the downtime you will neither be able to access your mails on the server nor to send mails via our server. Mails which are sent to the Dept. of Physics won't get lost, but will have some lag.

Emergency downtime of D-PHYS mail server today

Tuesday, December 27th, 2011

There will be an emergency maintenance downtime of the D-PHYS mail server later today (Tuesday, 27th of December) due to unexpected hardware issues.

Update 16:30: Everything seems to work fine again. It's though likely that there will be another downtime for further maintenance in early 2012.

Mail Server Upgrade on Wednesday, 5th of October

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

On Wednesday, 5th of October 2011, starting at 16:30, we will upgrade the operating system on several servers of our mail server cluster. This will result in temporary unavailability of most e-mail related services we provide: sending and receiving e-mails, mailing lists and webmail access.

Due to the maintenance e-mails may have some lag and arrive a few hours later than usual.

Update, 21:55: Upgrade of the incoming and IMAP/webmail/mailing list servers were successful. Everything is back to normal.

Mail Server Migration Part 3: Webmail + SMTP

Monday, March 1st, 2010

On Thursday, 4th of May 2010, starting at 5pm we will migrate our webmail service to the new mail server. Since there are no version upgrades of the webmail applications Roundcube and Twig, it will be a smooth transition and you shouldn't even notice the migration. The only thing which can happen is that you get logged out of webmail if you use webmail while the DNS entry changes to the new server address.

Update, Thursday morning: As yesterday morning's unexpected outage of the old mail server showed further hardware problems, we rescheduled moving the incoming (SMTP) mail server functionality to the new mail server to fit into today's maintenance window, too.

This will also be done by switching DNS entries, so you should not experience any interruption nor do you need to change any configuration. However this may cause some temporary issues (e.g. delays) since it does involve new software versions as well as new authentication backends.

Update, 22:45: New webmail and incoming mail server seem to work fine, nearly all users already use the new service installation.