Smile discovered an intermittent issue with the POP that caused some clients to time out when trying to connect to receive mail. The problem has been corrected, and mail is working normally again.

Thanks to the customers that submitted trouble tickets at http://billing.smileglobal.com/

Just a few numbers from some preliminary testing we’re doing on the spam filtering, with the combination of selective rDNS lookups and message scoring.

The selective reverse DNS filtering is blocking around 100 messages a minute, or almost 2 messages a second. These are send by infected computers around the world.

In addition, the message scoring system is deleting about 30 messages a minute, or a message every 2 seconds.

In addition to these spam blocks, we are also graylisting mail, tagging suspected spam, and checking various spam blacklists.

Please let us know how the filtering is doing by sending email to support or submitting a trouble ticket, at http://billing.smileglobal.com

We have seen spam volume increase by a large amount over the past month. Yesterday we implemented some additional filtering. Some of these filters appear to be a bit over-aggressive.

We have scaled back on the filters, and mail should be back to fairly normal as of Saturday morning. If you have bounce messages, or other issues, please let us know with as many specifics as possible, so we can continue to refine the rules.