We’ve started running the new graylisting system on the secondary mail server, and the early results are very promising. You should see a reduction in the amount of spam coming in starting Sunday morning and hopefully continuing through the week. If things go well, we’ll be implementing additional servers, and apply them to the primary and other mail servers.
If you have comments, or any input on spam over the last few days, please send a message to support.
Thanks
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been seeing a large spike in the amount of spam hitting our servers. At one point, we were seeing one spam filter tagging or deleting 2 to 3 messages a second. While the news is touting the environmental impact of spam, and the work to remove it, we’re seeing the direct result of that impact. We are continually needing to add more resources to our network to battle the onslaught of unwanted email. From bandwidth to additional servers and endless hours of tweaking, monitoring, repairing, and updating to keep unwanted mail at bay. We’re not alone. Many of the ISP’s we work with are seeing very large volumes of spam hitting their networks.
We’re working on implementing some new filtering to help reduce the quantity of both marked and unmarked spam Smile users are seeing in their mailboxes. We’re also launching an enhanced spam filtering solution for Smile customers using their own domain, and for anyone with domain mail that needs an enhanced spam solution. More on that in the near future. If you can’t wait, or have been looking for an enhanced solution, let us know. Otherwise, thanks for your patience, hopefully there will be some level of relief soon.
Smile experienced an issue with Real Time Blacklists which caused a delay in incoming mail. While some mail came through in a timely manner, many emails were delayed. The servers are now churning through the queue and should have all mail delivered shortly.
Some mail may be delayed further, depending on the sending mail server. You may also see a higher incidence of spam temporarily as we track down what RBL caused the problem and put the others in place.
We should have more posted shortly.
Smile Internet, like most mail providers, rely on a group of organizations that monitor spammers and maintain a list of bad addresses that spammers send spam through. One of these organizations was dsbl.org which recently discontinued service. Today, (March 11) they took their servers offline. This caused a problem for the Smile mail servers, where requests to the blacklist piled up, and the servers had trouble responding to new incoming mail.
The RBL requests eventually timed out, allowing some mail to come through, but the backup of incoming mail quickly piled up requests again. We were unlucky in troubleshooting the problem, because our test emails came in in a reasonable amount of time, which sent us searching in the wrong direction. After combing logs, restarting services, and some specific error reports from customers, we isolated the issue and removed all of the blacklists. Because of the specific way this issue occurred, our alerting system yep
We then checked the blacklist services and found that dsbl.org had stopped service, and we re-enabled the other services.
Currently the servers are working through a very large queue of mail that is coming in. Delayed mail should continue into the evening. We are monitoring the problem, and enhancing our alerting to provide us with better information on a queue issue, so if another blacklist goes down, we can quickly remedy the problem, and keep service at 100%.
