Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Mail Storage Issues
We have suffered from a high load on our Mail storage server since early Monday morning due to a large volume of backscatter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter)
The mail indexes were rebuilt on Monday due to suspected corruption but the high loads persisted through to Tuesday when it became apparent that many clients were downloading pop mail multiple times without deleting it.
At no point in time has any of our maintenance over the last 3 days resulted in the UID lists being rebuilt, ie we report exactly what mail is in your account using the same UID's as we did last week, and the week before, etc. It is not clear why so many users mail clients decided to redownload mail.
We are advising clients to store mail on our servers for only 3 to 7 days when using pop for 2 reasons. Should you mail client download mail in full then it will not bombard you with mail or cause our servers to become overloaded. Pop accounts have limited disk quotas so storing mail for more than a week is likely to lead to over use charges being raised by ourslves to your account.
As of 9am this morning the servers were all running with normal loads and no remaining bugs. If you are aware of any remaining issues with your account please contact us via the normal support mail address.
The mail indexes were rebuilt on Monday due to suspected corruption but the high loads persisted through to Tuesday when it became apparent that many clients were downloading pop mail multiple times without deleting it.
At no point in time has any of our maintenance over the last 3 days resulted in the UID lists being rebuilt, ie we report exactly what mail is in your account using the same UID's as we did last week, and the week before, etc. It is not clear why so many users mail clients decided to redownload mail.
We are advising clients to store mail on our servers for only 3 to 7 days when using pop for 2 reasons. Should you mail client download mail in full then it will not bombard you with mail or cause our servers to become overloaded. Pop accounts have limited disk quotas so storing mail for more than a week is likely to lead to over use charges being raised by ourslves to your account.
As of 9am this morning the servers were all running with normal loads and no remaining bugs. If you are aware of any remaining issues with your account please contact us via the normal support mail address.
# posted by Netserve @ 11:16 AM 
