topic A Christmas tradition in Plusnet Feedback

A Christmas tradition

jelv — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:09:31 GMT

Certain aspects of this season are very traditional, Christmas trees, turkey for Christmas dinner, mistletoe, carol singers, broken Plusnet email system.
It appears that this year Plusnet are determined that all the traditions are going to be observed (although perhaps not to the same scale as Christmas' past).
IronPort has been rushed out to a timetable dictated by the need to end the Postini contract (I wonder if it wasn't shut down by a certain date they were going to have to pay Postini a whole lot more money). However as with all systems there are teething troubles which need addressing - but as the Christmas code lockdown starts about now it means we are going to have to live with the problems until the new year.
At first the comms team were all over the IronPort and Email Platform Development forum, but replies in there seem to have very much dried up and there are issues to be addressed.

Whitelisting/blacklisting not working

Logging in to quarantine system doesn't work for mailboxes with aliases - no quarantined emails are displayed even though a quarantine email has been receieved and the emails can be viewed by using the link in those

With Edge Protection (blatant spam blocking) off, emails that would have been rejected had the setting been on are not treated as spam

Mailing lists broken - still waiting for news on how this is going to be resolved

Query over why the Eicar test virus emails are not delivered or quarantined even with edge protection off - are other emails disappearing in to the ether?

There's probably more - but it's enough to start with!

Re: A Christmas tradition

bobpullen — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 11:34:51 GMT

Quote from: jelv
Certain aspects of this season are very traditional, Christmas trees, turkey for Christmas dinner, mistletoe, carol singers, broken Plusnet email system.

Agreed, there are some outstanding issues following the introduction of IronPort but the vast majority of the problems are all in hand and are being addressed. I don't think any of the outstanding issues are critical to the core operation of the email platform.

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IronPort has been rushed out to a timetable dictated by the need to end the Postini contract.

It was delivered about 3 weeks behind schedule

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(I wonder if it wasn't shut down by a certain date they were going to have to pay Postini a whole lot more money).

Yes, it would have cost us more money to extend the contract into next quarter (a considerable amount at that).

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However as with all systems there are teething troubles which need addressing - but as the Christmas code lockdown starts about now it means we are going to have to live with the problems until the new year.

The issues are in hand however you're right when you say that there will be a network and code freeze in place. During this time only critical Priority 1 problems will be acted on. Other fixes can still be developed and tested but will not roll to the live platform until the second week of January at the earliest.

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At first the comms team were all over the IronPort and Email Platform Development forum, but replies in there seem to have very much dried up and there are issues to be addressed.

Sorry for the lack of updates. IIRC though, I answered every unread post in that forum on Thursday. On Friday I was out of the office and only 2 of the team were in. Over the weekend most of us like to spend a bit of time away from work

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Whitelisting/blacklisting not working

There is a Service Status open about this. It's probably going to need an Exim config change although we're waiting for some info from IronPort too.

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Logging in to quarantine system doesn't work for mailboxes with aliases - no quarantined emails are displayed even though a quarantine email has been receieved and the emails can be viewed by using the link in those

I had a look into this and was informed that quarantined emails for aliases should be visible when logging into the underlying mailbox. This isn't the case for a catch-all's or redirects though where emails to different addresses end up in their own Quarantine (meaning you have to rely on the summary reports rather than logging directly into the Quarantine portal). If this isn't what you're seeing then I'll double-check things again.

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With Edge Protection (blatant spam blocking) off, emails that would have been rejected had the setting been on are not treated as spam

This is on my list of things to chase up. This is the XIPAS: BSB header? If so, that's been reported by a user who has Edge Protection switched on.

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Mailing lists broken - still waiting for news on how this is going to be resolved

Mailing Lists are working on my account? I'll check the latest on threads over in the IronPort forum and pick up on any problems that have been identified there. There's no plans this side of Christmas to offer mailing lists for customers who did not already have them prior to migration.

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Query over why the Eicar test virus emails are not delivered or quarantined even with edge protection off - are other emails disappearing in to the ether?

This was virus quarantined successfully when I tried it (with spam Quarantining switched off). With spam Quarantine switched on, the virus email ended up in there instead of the virus Quarantine. Still need to look at this one in a bit more detail.

Re: A Christmas tradition

jelv — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 11:42:47 GMT

Bob, All of these points were lifted from open topics in the IronPort forum - it would have been better if you answered them there (perhaps just giving links to the answers in here).

Re: A Christmas tradition

jelv — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 11:58:06 GMT

Quote from: Bob
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IronPort has been rushed out to a timetable dictated by the need to end the Postini contract.

It was delivered about 3 weeks behind schedule

That it was delivered late doesn't prove that it wasn't rushed - it just proves that an unrealistic timetable was set in the first place!