We are currently experiencing some problems with our office ADSL/Broadband connection.  This is causing substantial delays to any messages currently being sent to any address at appliedconsultancy.com.

This connection problem does not affect any websites hosted through NamesAndSpace or any other ACSL web-based services.  Our support website, ACS Support, is also unaffected.

Update 1530: Our connection is now somewhat erratic both in terms of speed and reliability.  We are receiving some messages, and we will reply to those as soon as we get them.

Update 09:30 18th August: Our Internet connection is working normally.

As part of our normal operating schedule, several of our hosting servers will be undergoing routine maintenance between 18:00 and 19:00 tonight.  During this time, access to some services may be impaired or unavailable.

The ACS Support website will not be affected by tonight’s work and will remain operational should any customers wish to contact our support team.

For live status of all our NamesAndSpace (N&S) hosting servers, please visit http://status.appliedconsultancy.com.

As and when the maintenance work has been completed, our support team will update this blog.

Our technical support team has recently upgraded the NamesAndSpace webmail.  The new version of webmail is both faster and easier to use.

If you are a standard NamesAndSpace (N&S) hosting customer, you may access webmail at any time.  All you need to know is your e-mail address and password.  Once you have these to hand, open your web browser and go to http://mail.namesandspace.net.

For a guide and more information on N&S Webmail, please see http://support.appliedconsultancy.com/faqs.asp?content_id=3184.

A side-effect of yesterday’s Internet Connectivity Issues was that our backup mail systems were subjected to a near 24 hour real world test, which they passed with flying colours.  All our Backup MXs performed exactly as intended without compromising the service availability for any of our mail customers even when running under loads of tens of thousands of messages.

What’s a Backup MX?

In the event of one of our primary mail servers going offline, all mail traffic is automatically transferred to one of our backup servers, called a Backup MX.  This switchover is seamless and is completely transparent to both the sender and the recipient.  The Backup MX will then store all incoming messages until such time that primary server is online again, at which point all messages are automatically sent to it.

All NamesAndSpace hosting accounts that include mail services automatically come with a Backup MX facility so that in the event of our the N&S mail server going offline, you don’t lose any messages.

Changes to Spam Filtering

At the peak of yesterday’s traffic,  our Backup MXs were storing in excess of 20,000 messages pending delivery.  Needless to say, the vast majority – more than 90% – of these were spam or junk mail.  In light of this, we are revising our spam filtering systems to purposefully intercept and eliminate a substantial proportion of spam messages before they reach individual e-mail accounts.

Our spam filtering systems work on a score-based.  Every message passing through our servers is subject to a series of checks, each of which is designed to test a particular aspect or property of the message for validity.  If a check fails, then the a value is added to the message’s spam score.  Once the score reaches a threshold value – the spam mark threshold – , the message is considered to be a spam or junk message.  If the score reaches a higher threshold value, then the message will automatically be deleted.

The changes we have implemented are two-fold.  Firstly, we have lowered the bar of the spam mark threshold.  This will have the effect of a higher proportion of messages being marked as being Spam.

The second change is more proactive.  One of the checks we employ is called a Blacklist Lookup where the address of the sending e-mail server for each message is checked against an online list of known spamming servers.  If the sender is a known spammer, then the message in question will now be automatically intercepted and deleted.

Since we implemented these changes last night, the amount of spam messages reaching individual mail boxes has reduced significantly.  These changes were not made solely in light of yesterday’s issues as we had been planning to introduce them in the near future.  If anything, yesterday merely served to accelerate their introduction.

False Positives

In the highly unlikely event you may believe that some valid messages are being marked as spam – otherwise known as a false positive – please contact our Support Team via http://www.acssupport.co.uk for further assistance.

As always, if you have queries regarding any product or service supported by ACS Limited, please do not hesitate to contact our Support Team via http://www.acssupport.co.uk.

We’re experiencing a few intermittent connectivity problems with our office Internet connection this morning.  This in turn is delaying some messages being sent to any e-mail address at appliedconsultancy.com.  At present, we believe these issues to transitory and will should be resolved shortly.

These connection issues do not impact nor affect our NamesAndSpace (N&S) hosting servers, nor any of our own websites like ACS Support. All of our N&S servers are located within resilient data centres that incorporate multiple levels of redundancy.

Update 14:35

We’re still experiencing internet connection problems at our office which is impacting on our incoming messages.  At the last count, there were over 3,000 messages still waiting to arrive (95% of which will be spam).  If you have any questions or queries, please submit them via our support website http://www.acssupport.co.uk which remains fully operational and unaffected by these problems.

Update Wednesday 10:00

The internet connectivity issues have now been resolved and all outstanding messages have now filtered through to our mail systems.  If you sent a message to any e-mail address at appliedconsultancy.com it should now be with the intended recipient.  As with out NamesAndSpace hosting accounts, all our e-mail systems utilise Backup MXs (mailservers) to ensure that no valid (see below) mail traffic is lost.

We’re currently experiencing a few broadband issues at our office that in turn is impacting on our (ACS’) mail. Our support team is currently working to resolve this issue and are hopeful normal service will be resumed later today. If you have sent us a message, we apologise for the delay and we will reply as soon as our mail services return to normal.

This issue applies only to messages addressed to our domain, appliedconsultancy.com. All NamesAndSpace (N&S) e-mail services are working as expected, and you may continue to contact our technical support team via our support website at http://support.appliedconsultancy.com.

Update 14:45
Our office broadband issues have now been resolved and all messaging to and from appliedconsultancy.com e-mail addresses are now working. If you have sent us a message, you do not need to send it again as your original message is being held by our backup systems pending delivery.

As we receive several thousand messages per day, there will be an inevitable backlog of messages to clear. If you have a support matter, please contact our support team via our support website for a quicker response.

Our monitoring software has raised an alert with regards to a potential problem with one of our mailservers this morning (21/09/09).  Due to the nature of the issue, our support team will be taking the mailserver offline for a period of around 30 minutes to instigate a fix.

We aim to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.  Further updates regarding this issue will be posted on this blog.

Update 10:30

Normal mail service has been restored as of 10:15 this morning.

We are currently experiencing intermittent internet connectivity issues with the site that hosts our primary internal mailserver that handles mail traffic for appliedconsultancy.com.  These connection failures are beyond our control and are impacting on our inbound mail flow for all messages addressed to appliedconsultancy.com e-mail addresses.

These issues do not affect any NamesAndSpace e-mail services which are running as normal.  Our internal mail servers are hosted at a different site from their NamesAndSpace counterparts.

As a result of these issues, our normal support e-mail address of support@appliedconsultancy.com is not currently operational.  We ask all registered users to please use the alternate address of support@namesandspace.net to contact our support team.  Alternately, you may contact us via our support website, http://www.acssupport.co.uk.

Update 10:00

Normal connectivity was resumed earlier this morning.  As we receive significant amounts of spam (around 1000 messages and hour), our outstanding mail will take a little while to clear.

The support e-mail address of support @appliedconsultancy.com is now working again.

Over the last couple of days we have been experiencing problems with e-mail aliases and forwards on our mailserver.  E-mail aliases were either being deleted or disabled without any action by either us or customers.

After a detailed investigation, our support team traced the source of the problem to the online hosting control panel, Helm.  The hosting control panel is a web-based management tool that facilitates comprehensive management of NamesAndSpace hosting accounts including domains, website settings and e-mail configuration.

As part of its’ operations, Helm retains an internal record of all e-mail aliases configured through itself for websites under its’ control.  This list of e-mail aliases had become corrupted, and to compound matters, Helm was either deleting or disabling any e-mail alias it did not recognise on our mail server.  This behaviour is not documented by Helm’s developers, nor is it one we would expect any such management application to do.

Once the cause had been determined, our Support Team immediately isolated Helm pending corrective action.  Unfortunately, the necessary corrective measures required us to take our mail services offline for a period of 15 minutes.  Typically, we only perform such work outside of normal working hours and with prior warning.  However, in this instance, the severity of the problem necessitated immediate action and our mail services were taken offline between 14:55 and 15:10 today for the work to take place.

The problem in question has now been resolved and all normal mail services are now running as expected.

We apologise for any inconvenience this interruption of service may have caused.  We are actively working to minimise the risk of this problem from re-occuring.

The Helm Control Panel will remain offline until such time we are certain it will no longer have a potentially detrimental effect on our mail services.  If you require any changes to your NamesAndSpace hosting package, please contact us and we will make the necessary changes for you.

All of our NamesAndSpace servers and their associated services (Web, E-mail, FTP etc) are monitored from 24 hours a day from two separate locations to ensure high availability and continuity of service.  Our support team also performs routine housekeeping and integrity checks to ensure that our NamesAndSpace services are fit for purpose.

If you have any questions or queries regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact our Support Team.   Customers who have registered their e-mail addresses with us can simply e-mail support@appliedconsultancy.com with their query.  All other users, please submit a ticket via our support website, http://www.acssupport.co.uk.

As some of our support customers may be aware, we had a problem earlier today with the e-mail feed for our support ticket facility.  In correcting the issue, some old updates were re-registered causing duplicate e-mail alert messages to be sent out.

If you were a recipient of these duplicate or out of date messages, we apologise for any inconvenience or confusion their arrival may have caused.  We have now implemented a number of extended measures to mitigate the possibility of this issue from reoccurring.

Our support team fully investigated this problem, and it was sourced to an old enemy: spam.  Out of all the messages we receive through the support e-mail address (support [at] appliedconsultancy [dot] com *) less than 2% are actually support related.  In this instance, a deluge of SPAM messages, mostly Russian in origin and content and with sizable attachments had filled up e-mail account.

Despite some progress in recent months, Spam continues to account for at least 80% of all e-mail traffic.  Increasingly, we are seeing spam messages containing some form of malware (Virus, Spyware, etc.) as an attachment.  Our recommendation on handling suspect e-mail messages remains the same: If you don’t recognise the sender,or have any doubts, don’t open the message and delete it.

* The support e-mail address is only accessible by registered ACS Support account holders and through their nominated e-mail addresses.  Any messages sent to this address from an unknown e-mail accounts are automatically deleted.