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.
Spam is a major issue for every user and every provider of email. Running an effective email platform is a major challenge for us, and despite a lot of investment the spam situation only seems to have got worse. We know that many customers have seen an increase in the amount of spam received, particularly in the last month.
Christmas is always a busy time for spammers and they have refined their tactics to try and get around spam filters (even though to you and I the emails are obviously still spam). In November we announced a partnership with Postini, who are widely regarded as one of the world’s leaders in the fight against spam.
A detailed incident report relating to email delivery problems that occured on 22nd August, is now available over on the Comms Blog.
Ian
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.
Further information about the changes we are making for our customers, announced in the webmail incident report are now available. These deliverables were:
1) The ability to change your PlusNet username
2) Get a free .uk domain name
3) SSL encrypted connections for POP3 and IMAP email and FTP
4) Improvements to the ‘Manage my mailbox’ tool
5) The ability to blackhole username@username.plus.com
6) Publishing our spam detection rates on our website for comparison with other ISPs
7) Publishing our new Privacy Policy and Data Retention policies on our portal
Below follows an overview of the changes we are making and associated time-scales.
We hope you have a pleasant journey!
Well, we’ve finally done it!
And what a tremendous piece of work it has been for all those involved.
Yesterday we completed the particularly mammoth task that has involved moving all of our customers’ email over to our brand new mail platform based on the NetApp FAS3070 storage system.
It’s no big secret that email has been a sore point for us in the past and this is a monumental stepping stone towards reinstating the faith and trust we believe every customer deserves to have when it comes to the provisioning of their email services.
For anyone interested in the background behind this work or for those that missed it first time round, you’ll find my original forum posts below that go into specific detail regarding the problems we’ve had along with a technical overview of the mail platform:
PlusNet
Force9
FreeOnline
Metronet
The new implementation will go a long way towards fixing these issues.
I hope you’ll all join everyone here at PN towers in congratulating the engineers responsible for bringing this project to completion not only quickly and efficiently but with minimum disruption to customers’ service and only a few minor hiccups along the way (Hey nobody’s perfect!).
Here’s to the new storage platform and here’s to a new era!
Out with the old…
The NetApp FAS940 and Sun Storagetek 5310
In with the new…
The NetApp FAS3070
It’s not just the storage platform that’s had an overhaul. During the last few months we’ve also kitted our mxcore mail delivery platform out with a £120,000 re-fit and almost doubled the capacity of our mail collection servers. That’s not all we’ve done, we’ve introduced monitoring improvements, additional housekeeping and improved the way the platform handles spam.
All of this puts us well on our way to ensuring the problems of the past remain exactly that!
Rest assured we’re not going to put our feet up now. Oh no siree! Over the coming months we’ll be continuing to aim towards delivering a service that exceeds the customer expectation.
The hard work doesn’t stop here, but if anyone has any questions about this particular piece of work or the mail platform in general then feel free to leave a comment or join in the debate over on the portal forums.
Today, Phil Webb, Director (designate) of Network Services made the following post in our internal Announcements forum :
I have seen from the results of Dean’s 1-2-1 that fixing e-mail is mentioned many times and number of people think that fixing e-mail is his responsibility, well it’s not it’s mine.
I know how much ***** that e-mail has caused everyone across the business in the last 12 months, and thought it would be useful to let everyone know where it was, where we are right now and what is planned to improve it further.
Where we were….
Around this time last year there was a sever lack of storage and the platform was running at capacity. So we bought some new storage which caused us months and months of grief. We’d also stopped managing the users on the platform so things we getting worse.
Where we are now…..
We’ve started managing the platform again by archiving mail older than 90 days old and archiving and black-holing mailboxes that have not been accessed for 180 days.
We’ve also added around 1Tb of additional capacity to the netapps which means we’ve got headroom at the moment.
What is coming to further improve things……
We have another 2Tb of storage ready to add to the netapps as soon as we have fully planned it.
We are looking at options to increase the processing power of the netapps.
We are about to start moving the remaining mail from the Sun storage.
We are trialing various commercial spam detection solutions that have a 99.999% accuracy which comes in at around 1 false positive per 1,000,000 messages.
We are going to complete the rollout of the new MX Cores which increases the capacity of mail we can process by around 70%.
We are looking at implementing spam detection on the outbound relays to stop us being blacklisted so often.
We are looking at the function of the MX lasts so that they have similar protection to the MX Cores.
Scripts are being developed so that the CSC can do many of the things that require Net Ops at the moment and means there is less risk of error in future.
There is development underway to change the default mailbox so that it does not receive messages unless they are directed to a known address
The bottom line on all of this is that we’ve had a ***** time on mail, and we’ve significantly improved things so that it is not causing us all too much pain, but we still have many more things coming to further improve the reliability and functionality of the platform so that it causes us no pain at all and we have an e-mail platform we can be proud of.
Phil
We appear to be resuffering from intermittency for checking email accounts again. This was thought to have been resolved at 2am, but sadly has returned. Initial thoughts are that the MXCores are suffering under their current loads, and it’s also killing workplace and the portals.
Bob’s chasing with networks and then doing his service status piece. Looks like another one of those days 
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