All systems are go here… but you may have trouble getting to us if you are a FIOS customer… Verizon confirmed with us this morning that there is a gateway router down in the Philadelphia area that is affecting service state wide… no ETA…

**Update.. service seems to have been restored as of 9:18 AM EST

In an effort to protect our e-mail servers and our users from the possibility of being blocked/blacklisted/and otherwise marked as some sort of undesirable, we have implemented a 25 recipient maximum for outgoing e-mail for all our Zimbra servers.

If you try to send an e-mail with more than 25 recipents, you will recieve an error…

We can adjust this per user/domain/etc… but for now… 25 for everybody…

If you need to send an e-mail to more then 25 people, you are most likely using the wrong tool.. and should looking mailing list services such as phplist and Constant Contact.

Thanx…

I can’t begin to express my frustration with Microsoft and the lack of any help in correctly our issue… but… we have been able to restore delivery to MSN/Hotmal/and FrontBridge hosted accounts while we work out the root issue…

So… as far as “normal, everyday use”, all is good…. we will continue to work with Microsoft to ensure this does not happen again…

Thanx…

Still having issues… our IP is still being blocked, we are doing everything we can to rectify the issue, but the support structure at Microsoft that we are working through is tedious.

We can do nothing on our side, we need to wait until they either clear or give an indication of when the block will be lifted…

Thanx for your patience…

We do not allow “spamming” activity from our servers… “Great!”,  you say… “I’m sure the fine folks at #i2m/PoleStar keep that kinda riff-raff off our fine, fine servers”…

And we do… all of our clients are fine upstanding corporate citizens… and we know most of the companies that use, and with whom you share, this system quite well…

But, that does not mean what you think is a normal “e-mail”, can’t, in fact, be deemed as spam by others….

We are currently fighting with Microsoft to unblock our IP address from one of our four Zimbra servers at @msn.com and @hotmail.com, because one user sent a very legitimate e-mail to their 390 closest friends. This triggered the the spam protection at MSN and Hotmail…

It should be cleared up soon….

But please think before you send such a large “recipient” list e-mail… if you are sending a single e-mail to more then, lets say, 25 people… you are using the wrong tool… please contact us for help…

<serious stuff>

Furthermore, we have special filtering and scripts to identify and thwart attempted spammers, we discontinue service to suspected spammers promptly, and notify authorities when warranted.

</serious stuff>

We will be tightening out filters a bit to help prevent this is the future…

Please contact us with any questions…

Microsoft has blocked our IP address b/c too much mail from our server hit them too quickly, which is sometimes a sympton of spamming…

We are fully enrolled in the  SNDS program at Microsoft to help prevent this type of thing, and we are working currently to correct it with Microsoft…

Stay tuned…

Yup… today is 3.14… Pi day…

And to celebrate, here are the first one million digists of Pi:

http://www.piday.org/million.php

Around 6:00am EST on 3/8 we will be applying a patch that addresses several non-critical items on zimbra/zimbra2.polestarnetworks.net.  The patch requires a server restart that will interupt service for about 2-3 mins….

Hopefully you will be all in bed and will not notice the restart…

Thanx!

There has been bug identified in the latest version of Zimbra 7.1.4….

If you use Outlook, and the Zimbra Outlook Connector, and you leave your machine/Outlook running for several days without a log off/restart… Then you may get an error from Zimbra like the following…

Note: Soap Fault. Please recreate and resend the message. Details below:

Error Code: service.AUTH_EXPIRED

Error Text: auth credentials have expired

You will not be able to send/receive mail until you restart Outlook…

We are waiting for a pre-release of the ZCO that corrects this issue… once we have it we can deploy where needed until the next version of Zimbra is released….

Its been a week since the performance issues have been resolved… so we are calling this one squashed…

Thanx for your patience as we worked through the issue…

but…. (see next post)