It’s been a while since we last provided an update about our anti-spam platform back at the beginning of February. Since then you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s all been a bit quiet on spam front, but rest assured we’ve definitely not been been resting on our laurels. Over the last two months our developers and network engineers have been busy beavering away at the configuration, code and script changes that will allow us to introduce the functionality promised when we last blogged about the subject.
You may recall back in November we announced our partnership with email security experts Postini. We’ve steadily been migrating customers across to the new anti-spam platform and we now have just under three quarters of our customers with their email being filtered by the new Postini systems. More…
It should be no secret by now that we are currently in the midst of migrating all of our customers over to a new anti-spam platform that we have been developing in conjunction with Postini.
Spam has been a very hot topic in our forums of late and our Customer Support Centre have also reported large increases in the number of customers who are getting in touch to report spam related problems.
A lot of customers have already been moved to Postini, but the work is a multi-stage project and some customers have been unsure what to expect after migration. Many may not know that they’re on the new platform yet, whilst others will be curious as to when their accounts will be getting migrated. This blog post is intended to clear up a lot of this confusion, answer some of the more commonly asked questions and provide an overall update regarding the progress of the project…
More…
*For the latest Postini anti-spam developments please see the more recently published update that can be found here*
This blog is designed to give you an overview of Postini’s insights into the previous month’s spam.
I’m hoping to provide you all with a blog similar to this one each month, showing the previous month’s trend in spam messages.
In a somewhat bus like moment, two customer trials were announced yesterday. Both trials, one for a new Spam management solution and the other a new Broadband Phone service, will be available to all customers on an opt-in basis. Registrations for both trials are now being accepted.
*For the latest Postini anti-spam developments please see the more recently published update that can be found here*
Spam is undeniably one of the biggest challenges we face as a service provider when it comes to building a reliable, stable and dependable email platform that our customers can rely on. Some have even argued that the ever increasing torrent of unsolicited email that now plagues the Internet has almost brought question to the usefulness of email as a reliable tool altogether.
Providing bandwidth, dealing with all the problems caused by spam (not least mail delays!) and maintaining constant house-keeping regimes is extremely costly. Spammers are continuously changing their techniques to circumvent the anti-spam precautions providers put in place, and things are made extremely difficult due to the lack of consistency in the way different email servers are set up around the globe.
So what does this mean I hear you cry? Are you turning email off? Well, fortunately enough I don’t think it’s quite come to that, although we would like to ask for your help…
Following on from some hints in the end of day posts we are now ready to launch some more improvements to the Manage My Mail tool. The changes will be made tomorrow morning.
The idea behind this is to allow you, the customers, to add new address without having to understand the difference behind a mailbox, redirect or alias.
After some user testing it was decided the easiest way to achieve this goal was to introduce a wizard. The choices you make going through the wizard will automatically create the correct type of email address and then take you to a confirmation screen with any details you may need.
The first screen you see when logging in to the Manage My Mail area will now be a summary of all the email addresses you currently have, similar to this:-
Click the image for a clearer view of the page.
This should make it easier to control your existing addresses as well as create new ones.
Hopefully this will make your life easier when using our email system.
Thanks for reading.
Chris
In light of recent email problems, particularly delays, I thought I’d provide a quick update on the current state of play.
Good news is that we’re no longer suffering from email delays and all customers should be able to send and receive email in a timely fashion 
A number of things have contributed to the delays over the last week or so, and it’s been pretty tricky trying to keep abreast of them all. Here’s a quick summary:
Critical Path trial - On the 22nd August we encountered an unfortunate problem that led to extended email delays and some customers’ email being incorrectly rejected as spam. The last Service Status post can be seen here and there’s a detailed incident report regarding the problem that you can find here.
Outbound email delays - Late last week we started seeing reports in the forums of customers whose email was being delayed on our outgoing relay servers. This was narrowed down to file system errors that we found in our mail logs. Moving the database from disk storage to an separate RAM drive soon saw this problem resolved. This was last reported on Service Status here.
Inbound email delays - We encountered two separate issues this week that had the potential to delay some messages for customers. One was an unforeseen result of the work to debug the problems we experienced with the Critical path boxes. These issues were last reported on Service Status here and have since been resolved. We also identified a problem that we suspect to have always existed with one of the spam filtering processes on the delivery servers. This was fixed this morning following the introduction of a new housekeeping script as announced here.
Housekeeping - We will always encounter problems that we have to reactively respond to. That’s only half of it though. It’s important that we’re running regular reporting to pro-actively identify those customers that have the potential to start negatively impacting the service for others. Over recent weeks we’ve been running daily reports showing the top users of our relay servers by IP address. This is normally populated with customers who have a virus or misconfigured mail server and most if not all appreciate us getting in touch to let them know. Todays top offender had sent in excess of 53,000 emails over our relay server in a 24 hour period - Now that’s a lot of email!
Not only have we been beavering away at the above but we’ve also seized the opportunity to increase the capacity of our relay servers. Yesterday we added an additional 2 high-end servers to the platform bringing the total to 8. We’ve seen no problems so far and the reduction in load on the platform since their deployment is very promising indeed.
Hopefully we’ve seen the last of email delays for a while but make sure you let our support team know if you see any problems or give one of us Comms folk a prod over on the forums is you suspect anything awry 
Don’t forget that you can keep up to date with all the latest Service Status information by subscribing to the Usertool’s RSS or Email Feed.
Bob
Back in July some customers may remember reading a commitment that was made in one of my Email/Antispam updates that made reference to the introduction of spam and not spam buttons to our SquirrelMail webmail interface.
This was something that was raised as a suggestion way back in December last year by the UserGroup using their Issue Tracker.
It’s also one of the most requested features when we’ve asked our customers how we could improve our Webmail service.
Those who have seen the Usergroup Exclusive will already have heard the good news that the spam reporting buttons have now been rolled out to the live platform.
If you receive a message that’s marked as [-SPAM-] which isn’t, or a message that isn’t marked as [-SPAM-] but should be, then we would normally suggest that you forward it to our spam training addresses. This however can be cumbersome and some customers have been known to get confused about which details require forwarding.
Well help is at hand. If you use our Webmail platform then all this can now be achieved by a simple left mouse-click!
Bob
One of our customers, ‘Webwise’ on the portal forums, has also taken the time to create a plugin for Outlook Express that some of you might want to check out here.
I’m writing with absolute conviction when I say that this is one deliverable I’m sure a lot of customers with hosted domains will be very happy about! Particularly those managing their own DNS records or those running their own mail servers.
Today we will be looking to provide functionality on the portal that will allow customers to remove the mx.last secondary mail record from domains they have hosted on their account.
This is something that we often receive requests for, especially from business users. It’s also the 5th most voted for network feature over on the Usergroup Issue tracker.
Removing the mx.last MX record from a domain allows customers with the necessary technical expertise to manage their own email in it’s entirety without being forced to use our back-up mail servers.
Here at Plusnet we're always trying to use clever open source things to make our lives easier. Sometimes we write our own and make other people's lives easier too!
We sell broadband, phone, VoIP and more to homes and businesses in the UK. Winner of 9 out of 11 Categories in the 2008 USwitch survey. Winner of "Best Consumer ISP" at 2008 ISPA awards. Voted number 1 in the Broadband Choices 2008 survey.
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