the recent spam attack

[Rik]

It would be like going to Sky News rather than BBC News, Malc. The outgoing server can be changed easily by the user, but the incoming mail is already addressed. If you try and force it to go somewhere else, it has no idea where that somewhere else is.

[Gary]

26 hours is a long time for a backbone service to be down but as simon said, rock and hard place do spring to mind, if hosting on the mail server and the spam attack caused this that to me says do no host other services on that server so this will not occur email is more important than blogspace etc, and normally I would not moan but as stated, its happened too many times now, Idnet mail works well the spam filter system is excellent but I think its time that the mail side is made more robust. All in all Its frustrating and annoying, I pay for hosted mail, and most peeps on here pay for IDNet as their ISP, IDNet are good at what they do, but this crash was waiting to happen and really after the last one no remedial action to make the .com mail system more secure has been taken it appears, seems like its all lumped together on Trevor for the wrong reasons.

[Malc]

I was thinking for the future to be transfered there


I suspect Richard Branson has done this, to sabotage every other IPS, so that when all his customers get there threatening letters about having downloaded one MP3, (instead of buying it from Virgin megastores) they don't jump ship.

Either that, or it's Gordon Browns fault.

[Rik]

TBH, the two mail systems work to a very different standard, Malc. One costs £4pm if you buy it, our one costs £1pm.

I'm sure there will be a post-mortem once things are working again - IDNet don't want this any more than we do.

[kinmel]

The outgoing server can be changed easily by the user, but the incoming mail is already addressed. If you try and force it to go somewhere else, it has no idea where that somewhere else is.

that is only because no standby arrangement is in place.

My mail server is right next to me at home and as such is liable to all sorts of interruptions and so I have arrangements in place.  My web and email servers are duplicated at another address piggybacked in someone else's machine.

In an emergency anyone of us with net access can go to EveryDNS and change my primary server IP address to the standby IP address, the change is instantaneous. and all email is then handled by the standby.

We tidy up the stray emails by manually forwarding them afterwards from the standby to the primary server.

All our web and email arrangements are done by amateurs using free-ware and free-web utilities, so how hard is it for a specialist provider to achieve that and more.

[Rik]

I can't argue with you, Alan. OTOH, maybe the volumes involved here make it more complex?

[somanyholes]

a few thoughts....

If the idnet mail servers where under attack, changing the dns would make no difference. All you would be doing is transferring the load from one box to another, guess what would happen next....

Smtp authentication is all well and good, but if a client gets infected it will just act as a mail relay using the clients settings to send outbound mail through the idnet mail servers, this seems to be happening more and more.... I hope idnet have maximum connections from clients set

Trying to sort out mailservers with massive ques is a complete nightware, mad and I had this issue before, 3 mailservers with over 700,000 emails on each box, it took three days for normal service to resume.

Will be interesting to see what happens.

Have to concur with a few peeps on here, multiple public services on two box's is not a good idea...

Hope its sorted for you all soon.

so

[LesD]

My wife regularly corresponds by email with an old English girl friend living in the USA. For quite a time during the last few months, email sent by my wife has been bounced by her friends ISP (Verizon) stating that IDNet is on their blacklist as being the gateway by which spam emails have entered the Internet.

Your wife JB is not alone with this experience as the same fate befell my wife a week or three ago when the same thing happened to emails she was sending to her sister. This was to an address she had been using for months!

This is what came back:

Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender

This is the mail system at host lda.idnet.com.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

                   The mail system

<XXX@totalpeople.co.uk>: host
    icms-g1-1.keele.netcentral.co.uk[212.57.252.nnn] said: 554 5.7.nnn This
    message has been blocked because it is from a FortiGuard - AntiSpam black
    IP address.(connection black ip 212.69.36.nnn) (in reply to RCPT TO
    command)

(some changes to preserve anonymity)

I sent the above to IDNet Support and had this reply:

Hi Les
>
> It would appear that the mail server at netcentral.co.uk has blocked
> the
> email. However, FortiGuard themselves do not view our mail server as
> being
> on a "black list":
> http://www.fortiguardcenter.com/antispam/antispam.html
>
> I would recommend that your sister-in-law reports this to her email
> provider.
>
> regards
> Simon


So I advised my sister-in-law to do just that.

More recently, before the current outage, mail did appear to be getting through to her again but from what I gather it was a bit hit and miss. In between times we resorted to my old virgin.net dial-up account to send her emails.

I did not bother posting here because I thought the problem would be unique to us!

[JB]

I did not bother posting here because I thought the problem would be unique to us!

Hi Les,

No not unique at all. It is exactly what we experienced. In fact I thought our experience was unique.

As she could 'get around' the problem by using a Gmail account I didn't bother posting the experience until now.

I think IDNet is the best ISP I have used (out of about six over the last ten years) but I _do_ wish they would get their email services up to scratch.

Cheers,

JB.

[pup]

  Get well soon Trevor

[Rik]

Nice of you to say that, LinLin, we're all feeling a bit battered by now.