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
A detailed incident report relating to email delivery problems that occured on 22nd August, is now available over on the Comms Blog.
Ian
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.
Following the Webmail Incident in May, we withdrew our @mail Webmail solution and implemented SquirrelMail as a temporary solution. We recently began the process of reviewing alternative Webmail applications and in our investigation into many of them we were led back to thoughts of “Squirrelmail can do this, Squirrelmail does that better” etc…
So, we’ve been scratching our heads. We know that SquirrelMail doesn’t exactly look fantastic, but it certainly is a great performing, powerful Webmail client. It does what it says on the tin and it’s fairly easy to use too (albeit with its little kinks). The ability to change the theme and display preferences make it bearable with regards to looks also. In fact, many customers have commented on how refreshing SquirrelMail is to use.
With that in mind, we’d like to see what you guys think – in general. Now, we know we can’t please everyone without offering every Webmail client under the sun – and that certainly isn’t possible. What we would like to do is provide a Webmail service that meets the needs of our customers, performs well, is scaleable, functional and, above all, is secure.
What we want to know then, is - should we consider keeping SquirrelMail going forwards? What would you guys need to make SquirrelMail work for you? What functionality is lacking? What ‘extras’ would you like? How could we improve it? Do you like SquirrelMail? Do you really dislike SquirrelMail, if so - why? Should we dismiss it entirely? Do we need to make it look nicer? Is a nice ‘skin’ all it needs?
Now, this is not a decision to stick with SquirrelMail. Nor is it a “U-turn” on what we’ve previously said. As I’ve said above, we’re looking at all the options available to us, and having used SquirrelMail for a couple of months we’ve seen it as a real strong contender amongst Webmail clients… and one that could provide us with a permanent solution going forward. We just want to get you guys involved and see what you think.
Do let us know. You can contribute to the forum thread here!
The battle against spam remains at the top of our priority list. Alongside the measures we are taking, customers can also take steps to reduce the amount of spam in their mailboxes.
As well as turning on the spam checking tool we provide with every account, we have provided a number of new options which, if applied with care, can dramatically reduce the amount of spam received. We are currently producing a video tutorial which will offer more guidance, but in the meantime customers might find the Blog article on Using the Manage My Mail tool helpful.
With unsolicited email still very much a hot topic across the Community, I felt it was about time for another update on where we are with regards to the ongoing battle against spam.
Since the last update, we’ve shifted from working on the Manage My Mail tool and email API, to focussing on upgrades and configuration changes that we can make at the server level to help reduce spam volumes and improve the reliability of our anti-spam detection. More…
This is intended to be a guide on how to use the Manage My Mail tool to effectively cut down the amount of spam being received into your mailboxes. I have based it on the way I use the tool to deal with spam which has proven to be very effective.
We do have a support page on how to use this too, you can find this here
First of all I’ll show you where the tool can be found.
Simply browse to the member centre at http://portal.plus.net and log in.
Once you are logged in click the link to Email Settings and you will see a screen similar to this:-
(click image to expand)
You should then click on the Manage My Mail icon.
This will take you to the first page of the Manage My Mail tool which allows you to add, edit or remove mailboxes from your account.
If you are finding that email is coming to your default mailbox then I recommend renaming this, click the ‘rename’ link if you want to do this.
(click image to expand)
Personally I renamed my default mailbox to ‘Chris’, you can obviously choose whatever you wish to use.
Once you have done this you may want to turn off the ‘catch-all’ feature of this mailbox if this is not already done on your account.
This will stop people being able to send emails to anything@username.plus.com and means they will only be able to use the specific mailboxes, redirects or aliases you have set up. (We’ll get on to aliases later on)
Click the tab labelled ‘catch-all’ and it will take you to this screen:-
(click image to expand)
Change the status in the drop-down box to ‘off’ and press submit.
When I did this on my account it stopped about 70% of the spam without taking any further measures.
The next thing I would do is register the free .co.uk domain we are offering customers affected by the spam problem. If you have already registered it then you can skip this step.
Stay logged in to the member centre but click the ‘Domain Names’ link on the left, this will take you to a screen like this:-
(click image to expand)
Click the button and this will take you through the process to register a free .co.uk, .me.uk or .org.uk domain name. If you try to register a domain with a different extension then you will get charged at the normal rates for this.
Once you have registered the domain you can now alter the spam settings on an individual domain basis. Click on the spam tab and you will be taken to a page with a drop down box of all your domains, you can change the settings per individual domain or on all your domains by clicking the relevant checkbox.
(click image to expand)
Once this is registered then you can use this for your emails. To ensure that you are only going to receive emails to your new domain and not to mailbox@username.plus.com then you need to raise a ticket to request us to turn emails to username.plus.com off. Again when I did this it eliminated all but 1 or 2 spam every few days to my mailbox.
To deal with these final few spam messages you may want to have anything marked as [-SPAM-] deleted automatically or delivered to an IMAP folder at http://webmail.plus.net so you can check through them before deleting any messages. They will then be removed from here after 21 days.
The final step I take is to ensure I know exactly what email address I have given to different people and companies.
For friends and family I give them the chris@domain.co.uk address, however if I need to use an email address to sign up to something I tailor the address to match the company.
For example if I am signing up for eBay I set up an alias or redirect for ebay@domain.co.uk to arrive in my normal mailbox. I can then see where my emails are arriving from, if I do start getting spam then I know where it’s coming from.
To set up aliases once again you need to visit the Manage My Mail tool.
Click the Aliases tab and you will be greeted with this screen:-
(click image to expand)
As you can see there is already an alias set up on here to receive emails from PlusNet. I also want to set up an ebay alias so I click on the Add New Alias button.
Enter the name of the new alias and select the mailbox you want to point this to, I have used an alias name of ebay and pointed this to my chris mailbox.
(click image to expand)
This means that any emails sent to ebay@domain.co.uk will be received into the same place as chris@domain.co.uk.
These steps proved very effective for me, hopefully they will for you too.
Chris Parr
PlusNet Comms Team
Following-up on the webmail incident report, we pledged to provide answers to any remaining queries which the original report didn’t address. We have answered as many of those questions as we can here, although primarily for reasons of ongoing platform security there are a number of questions asked that we have not provided direct answers to.
Since May, we have been focused on a 90 day plan which we formulated following the webmail incident. This combines a number of sub-projects, some of which were already in progress before the event (Such as ensuring PCI compliance), and others that have come about as the result of the adoption of harder security standards across our operation. This has ranged from internal doors being locked down with biometric access, to the rebuilding of servers and other network elements with a view to application standardisation and code consolidation (which will have the added benefit of making future developments simpler and more robust). The project also includes publishing our data retention and privacy policies and ensuring these are implemented fully in all parts of our operation.
More…
Following on from the webmail incident PlusNet have added more functionality to the Manage My Mail tool.
These features are:-
- Customers can now set up a redirect to automatically blackhole an address using the redirect option
- Mailbox names can now be 1 character long, previously the minimum was 2 characters
- Increased search functionality on mailboxes and redirects, this will make it easier to find a specific mailbox
- Redirects can now be edited without losing the search/sort options currently in use
- When a mailbox is deleted customers are now warned that any associated aliases will be removed
- There is now a link back to the customer portal from webmail
- The attachment size allowed in webmail has been increased from 2MB to 7MB
These activities are additional features to go alongside the deliverables in the Webmail Incident Report
There are still more ideas and features in the pipeline and we will update you as we have more information.
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!
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