@ Midnight Caller

The headers you have put on don't show Postini in there and they appear to be from before this work occurred last night.

Gary - your account still seems to be avoiding Postini.

There are no Postini headers in the mail at all, which indicates that all is as it should be with your account.

B.

http://community.plus.net...rum/index.php/topic,63009 looks like it might be something to do with the overnight changes.

Thanks Chris & Baz.

Here's the latest:

50950 - Limitation on mailbox drop-down for 'Move to Mailbox' option.

This is now in Gamma testing awaiting roll-out to the live platform.

50955 - Rising Queues On The Mx.lasts / Mx.cores Accepting Mail From Non-Postini IPs

We've identified the cause of this and are now in the process of applying the fix to each of the mail servers. Once this is done the queues should start coming down and nobody (apart from those who've opted out) should see messages coming directly via the mx.cores/mx.lasts.

50956 - Postini whitelisting problems.

This is still under investigation.

50958 - Subject lines missing for emails redirecting to external addresses

This is a new one. Redirected email to external addresses is getting the subject line stripped. e.g. you might have a redirect set up to forward to a gmail address. When you check your gmail account, the messages are there but with blank subject lines.

Further updates to follow. Thanks  to everybody who's helped us in identifying these issues.

They've only just started appearing. I may be wrong and haven't time to have a good old look back but I don't think I've EVER seen them before.


I have been scathing simply because PN keep repeating the same old fundamental mistakes over and over and over again. I keep seeing the apologies. I keep hearing that things have changed and it wont happen again in the future. I keep hearing that things are always reviewed and tested. I hear ALL of the placating words that come out at times such as this but I'm very sorry, I also see very little substance in them after hearing them so frequently and for so long.

Customers still see fundamental and very obvious problems like this suddenly appearing. Things that have worked quite correctly for ages suddenly stop working simply because someone didn't bother to test their latest tweaks out effectively (if at all) before implementing them on the customer facing system. Someone presumably didn't even bother to monitor the system after the changes to find out if things were working as they should be either or you would have known about the issue and would have reported the issue before I (and presumably others) found it. It always seems to be the customers that do the testing and evaluation and not PN even when it could and should be so simple to avoid most of the silly mistakes that inevitably tend to happen when any changes are being made.

No service status either it would appear. Everything's all green and hunky-dory according to everywhere I've just looked. How can this be if PN already know there is a fundamental problem and are looking into it ? Is it any surprise that people get upset ? No, I think not.

I have no problem whatsoever with accepting that things sometimes go wrong no matter how hard you try to avoid it and no matter what the circumstances may be. I can totally accept the loss of 700GB of data due the rather unfortunate use of a fat finger in an inappropriate place but silly, totally obvious and totally avoidable fundamental issues like this are absolutely NOT in that category. This issue would have shown up had the changes been reviewed and tested prior to unloading them onto customers. PN may well believe that they do not plan for problems but they sure do make a real good effort to encourage them happening by apparently not taking even the smallest of steps to avoid them and mitigate the risk.

Specification.Specification.Specification.Specification.Specification.
Planning.Planning.Planning.Planning.Planning.
Management.Management.Management.Management.Management.
Review.Review.Review.Review.Review.
Testing.Testing.Testing.Testing.Testing.

The fundamental steps used by just about everyone involved in design/development who is NOT involved in anything PC, generic software or ISP related to maximise performance, minimise final costs, ensure quality and minimise avoidable problems from reaching customers and therefore causing annoyance, embarrassment or whatever.  Not a 100% solution to any/all problems by any stretch of the imagination of course but a whole lot better than not doing it. Testing and Quality Control are intended to be in-house functions and not something that is generally sub-contracted to customers aren't they !

Sorry Bob, excessively scathing it might well be but I see yet another example of totally avoidable problems being totally encouraged to happen rather than learning from any/all past mistakes.

I've come across something that looks to me like a bug but I'm not sure if it's intentional or not: when I select the option to quarantine spam, all of the 'aggressiveness' options below become greyed out. Is this deliberate? Whilst I'm just keeping things on '1' anyway so it doesn't bother me, I expect some people might like the ability to customise the severity of spam that gets quarantined.

See here for examples where they've cropped up in the past.


Things *are* always reviewed and tested. Mistakes *do* happen. With a large scale email config change like this, we can only really simulate the live environment when testing.

You seem to infer that we have absolutely no process mapping in place at all Mike? We do and we follow it religiously. Due to the agile rate at which we work as a business though, I'm afraid that problems will crop from time to time. We could spend months testing every solution we implement but would customers really be willing to wait that long in the industry we work in?


The person monitoring (who needless to say was in for the roll-out at 1:00am) has only recently left to get some sleep! We're human and every aspect of the platform cannot be looked at and regression tested simultaneously. We have to look at the more obvious things first. FYI, our net-ops team have now taken over the monitoring and problem investigation duties.


The Service Status is on its way. As I'm sure you can imagine we're all busy working on this and trying to minimise the potential fall-out.

I understand that this comment has caused some significant upset.  Can I please categorically state that this comment was absolutely NOT aimed at anyone in particular and is in no way intended to be a personal attack on any specific individual in any way, shape or form.   I do not generally 'do' personal attacks in any case and I most certainly would never do so in public.  If a 'serious' row is warranted and it needs to get personal then that's something to be done in private not public.  The comment was aimed purely and simply at PN as an entity and not directed towards any specific individual whether they are 'visible' on here or lurk anonymously  behind the scenes in PN towers. A generic Mr.Stupid if you like.

My humble and grovelling apologies if it has been taken as being in some way a personal attack and has caused any offence whatsoever.  A rather unfortunate phrase that I tend to use a lot but genuinely not a veiled personal attack I can assure you.

  x lots

Deliberate. The aggressiveness filters relate to the scanning and tagging *our* servers carry out. If you choose the Quarantine option then all the stuff our servers would normally do is disabled as Postini's systems do it instead.

Bob

I haev applied the postini quarantine service across all of my listed domains in my spam settings, ie mydomain.f9.co.uk, mydomain.force9.co.uk, mydomain.f9.net which all obviously relate to the same e-mail box.

If I say log into postini.default@mydomain.f9.co.uk or postini.default@mydomain.force9.co.uk should I have the same quarantine list displayed for both accounts, as it currently stands iam only getting a list under logging in under postini.default@mydomain.f9.co.uk, and this shows all e-mails that have attempeted to be delivered but which have been quarantined.  The other account domain login is completly emtpy.

Thanks

Andy

Fair enough - suppose I should have worked that out myself really, had I thought about it... so how does the Postini systems' way of doing things compare with PlusNets - i.e. roughly speaking, should I expect more or less spam to be quarantined under Postini than would have been tagged under PlusNet's 'aggressiveness level 1' setting?

@andyrogers

As far as Postini are concerned each domain is a totally separate entity so you will only see the quarantined emails in the domain to which they were sent. It is only when they reach PN that they are all mapped on to the same set of mailboxes.

@jelv

What iam trying to say is that e-mails for my.name@mydomain.f9.co.uk & my.name@mydomain.force9.co.uk and all be listed under one account ie, mydomain.force9.co.uk address when I login.  If I log into the other no items appear in that domain under postini, they are all held in the first domain, not mydomain.f9.co.uk .

Are you understanding me on this?

Thanks

Andy

Yes I understand - what you are seeing is exactly what I would expect.

mydomain.f9.co.uk and mydomain.force9.co.uk are two totally different domains as far as Postini are concerned so spam emails will end up in only one or other message centre according to which domain it was sent to.

Hi Bob

My AC's F9 & PlusNet are not receving mail, I sent my self a test Message and it did not arrive, yes I have looked in the Spam folder, I am not getting Messages from this Forum as well.      

[Edit]

I have raised  a tikit, tikit No: 24650363