We are closely monitoring the mail queue, and backlog of messages. The spool is processing, and the server has accepted the mail, and is processing into mailboxes now, as well as managing everyone’s backlog of send messages. There are still a large number of messages to process, but it appears that the majority of mail will be processed within the next hour.
For long time Smile customers, you’ll know that in the case of server issues we are usually quick to respond to outages and system problems. We maintain automatic onsite and off-site monitoring systems to alert our technicians 24 hours a day, 7 days a week of any system issues.
Smile recently changed service providers for our monitoring, and we found that there was an error in the monitoring system configuration that allowed test messages to go through, but when an actual service outage happened, none of our technicians were notified. As noted in the post below, no mail was lost, however mail was delayed for several hours. We understand that your business depends on your email, and our business depends on your business.
We have corrected the alerting configuration, and we are reviewing the server logs to determine the original problem.
All of us here at Smile understand that this is unacceptable, and we will be doing everything we can to ensure we are aware of all service affecting issues, and respond to them quickly in the future.
Please accept our apologies.
The Smile Internet Management and Staff
The mail servers are quite busy with the backlog, but we are monitoring closely and they appear to be processing mail quickly.
We are still working through all of the issues. At this point, there with our offsite monitoring system and alerting system. We are working through why both the alerting was not passing information to our technicians.
Here are some answers to the most common questions coming in:
Q: Is incoming mail lost?
A: No, in almost all cases. The server that experienced the problem was the customer access server, where you send and receive mail. Mail is spooled on the Smile Mail system if that server is not available. So all mail received at Smile this morning is in the queue, and the servers are processing it not. The queue is fairly large and it may take some time to process all of the mail. All mail sent to you should be in your mailbox in the next couple of hours.
Q: Why did the server stop working?
A: Our engineers are looking into the server outage to find the source. At this point we do not have the source of the problem.
We will be posting more information as it becomes available.
Smile experienced a serious mail server issue this morning. In addition our paging and alert system did not provide alerts. The mail system is repaired, and we are working through our alerting system. This is unacceptable to us here at Smile, and we sincerely apologize. We will be posting more information here as it becomes available.
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