Smile’s Primary Mail sever experienced occasional short interruptions in service, which became service effecting early on January 12. We dispatched technicians to the data center and repaired the server. Below are the service updates.

Update 01-12-10 6:29 AM — The server is performing normally, and we believe this has resolved the issue. If you have questions or comments, please submit a trouble ticket at http://billing.smileglobal.com with a priority of low.

Update 01-12-10 5:47 AM — The power supply has been replaced. We are fairly confident this will resolve the intermittent outages we have been seeing over the past few hours. We are monitoring the server status, and all appears normal.

Update 01-12-10 5:19 AM — We will be replacing the power supply at about 5:45 this morning, pacific time. We are anticipating 15 – 30 minutes of downtime on the primary mail server. Incoming mail will be spooled and no mail will be lost. We will restore service as soon as possible.

Update 01-12-10 4:51 AM Pacific — We are monitoring the server and still seeing intermittent outages. We are still running tests, but we may be replacing a power supply sometime this morning, which will cause a downtime of about 15 – 30 minutes. We will update here before and after the downtime.

01-12-10 – Smile is experiencing intermittent outages with the primary mail server. We are working on the problem. Please watch this site for updates, and potentially an announcement about a maintenance period.

Aug 3, 2009 We have done some additional testing and have eliminated the primary issues with the additional spam filtering servers, and we are now offering this service to domain customers at no additional charge as an optional service. Please see ourknowledge base for more information.

July 29 2009 – We have removed the additional spam filtering from our servers. It will take a couple of hours to propagate the change, but you should see mail (and the level of spam) go back to the way it was last week. Please pass our apologies to your users.

The tests we ran on the system were very successful, and the spam filtering capabilities were excellent, however, as a whole, the few problems we experienced were not worth the value. We will reevaluate, do additional testing and move forward in the future.

Smile’s POP and IMAP server had a complete hardware failure today. Once we identified that the issue was hardware related, we brought the secondary server online.

No mail was lost during the outage, however the date on some mail processed right after the spare server came up was incorrect, as the server was processing mail before the automatic NTP (Network Time Protocol) service was able to set the time correctly on the server. This has been resolved, and the date and time on all messages coming in should be correct.

Mail is still processing, as the queue grew during the server switch. We should see all mail in the queue processed within the next 90 minutes, again with the date and time correct.

We apologize for the outage, and not responding more quickly to calls and emails. Thanks for your patience.

If you have any questions, please let us know. This did not cause any outages with any other Smile services. Web, XMX, and other services have been working normally.