Email problems - March 31, 2009

[Rik]

They have a number of servers, iirc, smtp is on one machine, pop & imap on a second, webmail on a third, then there are the background and grey-listing servers.

[Simon_idnet]

Hi Dopamine,

There are no mail delays at all this afternoon. If you can please email us the address that you're having trouble with then we can investigate.

The problem overnight was caused by a customer who has access to one of our secondary servers (hosted-domain mail) which then feeds into the main processing servers. That secondary server does indeed have tarpitting rules that are designed to track and block excessive traffic from source IP addresses. It seems that this customer (or rather his virus) managed to circumvent those rules. Now we just have to work out how that happened and adjust the rules accordingly.

Regards
Simon



Post edited by Simon, due to privacy concerns.

[Dopamine]

Hi Dopamine

There are no mail delays at all this afternoon. If you can please email us the address that you're having trouble with then we can investigate.

The problem overnight was caused by a customer who has access to one of our secondary servers (hosted-domain mail) which then feeds into the main processing servers. That secondary server does indeed have tarpitting rules that are designed to track and block excessive traffic from source IP addresses. It seems that this customer (or rather his virus) managed to circumvent those rules. Now we just have to work out how that happened and adjust the rules accordingly.

Regards
Simon

Thank you for your reply, although I'm not at all happy that you address me on this forum with personally identifiable and confidential information that I've never made public. (It's the principle that wrankles, not the actual information that's given away)

There are delays. I've experienced one, which is why I posted. I had also telephoned support prior to your post here. I discussed your grey listing, my domain and the email problem. I had a partial reply, but your support representative was unable to answer my question completely.

My question regarding grey-listing was: Are greylists reset periodically, and if so how often?
The answer I received was : Yes they are, but I don't know how frequently. I believe it might be monthly.

I asked, because an email sent to my IDNet address from my own domain was delayed by grey-listing, something I believed should not happen as I regularly receive emails from this domain to my IDNet address. It was further explained to me that grey-listing covers IP addresses and some other parameters, and that as my domain host is a large organisation (GoDaddy) with many IP addresses and mail servers, it's quite likely that emails will often be delayed by IDNet's grey-listing.

Personally I find IDNet's grey-listing problematic. The occasional delay is acceptable for an initial email, but when it repeatedly kicks in it becomes a nuisance. I don't suffer this problem with any other email service, be it free ones like hotmail and yahoo, or when using my own domain's email or the email services of other ISPs.




Post edited by Simon to address privacy concern.

[Tacitus]

.....I've moved to a paid email service elsewhere, but not everyone wants or can afford to do so, nor should they need to given the prices IDNet charge for their email inclusive broadband packages.

The main reason I would use a separate email service is for ease of changing ISP - the address moves with you.  TBH 'all" ISPs can get hit with this sort of thing from time to time and an independent service is no guarantee.  If you use shared hosting, a hit on one domain on the server can take the rest down with it.

In the end it comes down to how good the ISP/hosting co are at blocking this stuff.  Sadly, none of them are immune.