One of our webmail servers is being rebooted, this is similar to the problem yesterday. Once it's back up we'll be considering what to do with it so as to stop this problem happening again.

This will affect some Squirrelmail users, and all Roundcube users.

It's back up.

There have been some times recently where customers have had their email accounts compromised and used by a third party to send out lots of spam through our servers. This results in some of our servers being added to third party black lists which causes problems.

Whilst we have monitoring in place and do act when this happens we have implemented some extra spam checking on our outgoing email servers.

This mainly affects authenticated email, and will result in IP addresses being fire-walled for a period of time if it seen sending multiple spam messages.

We'd appreciate feedback if legitimate email is wrongly classified by mistake.

We're in the process of over-hauling our spam checking servers. This is involving new servers and updated software. These new servers will be put in to service over the next few weeks.

We expect this to further improve our spam checking accuracy.

We welcome feedback, especially if spam classification is incorrect. The new spam servers are called G.spamless, H.spamless, I.spamless and J.spamless - these names will appear in the headers of the email.

Since noon on Wednesday 19th we've been spam checking incoming email with the new servers. We are monitoring and would appreciate any feedback people may have with respects to whether some spam emails are not being marked as spam.

The RoundCube webmail has been updated. 

One of the things you'll soon notice is the new 'skin' - you can change back to the old style if you prefer by going to: Settings - User Interface, and set the Skin to 'Classic'

There is a problem at the moment with the initial login page not working and needing to re-enter your password on the next page - this is being investigated.

Logging in to roundcube is now working as expected from the initial webmail page - sorry for the inconvenience.

We'll be doing some work on our spam servers w/c 9th May. Including updating the spamassassin software and reviewing the various plugins and extra rulesets that we use.

We don't expect any downtime - we have multiple spam checking servers and we wil start this process using internal testing servers.

If you have any feedback on the spam checking capabaility, please do email support

We have changed the level of email that accounts for 'light' usage from 1,500 to 5,000 messages per month.

For more information please see: http://www.aaisp.net.uk/domains-emailhigh.html

To help reduce the spam we relay from infected of hacked computers, we run messages through spam and phishing signatures which check for known virus, phishing and spam messages.

We now also checking the IP address connecting to us against 'DNS Blacklists'.

(If you find your IP is on a blacklist then the MX Toolbox site is a good place to test your IP address against lots of blacklists.)

If we deny access then a suitable error message with details is given. You can speak to Support who can help diagnose a problem with you.

We will be monitoring this new feature and will be reviewing, do pass on feedback if you have any.

We've disabled the blacklists checks for the moment.

(More customers than expected where being blacklisted, we'll re-visit this next week)

-Just to calrify, we're doing these extra checks to help protect our mail server from being blacklisted themselves due to customers relaying junk email through us. -the goal is to ensure we provide a reliable email service without causing delays and spreading junk email accross the Internet.

As some of you will have seen, and as we announced recently, we have started to put email usage in to one of three tiers. They are Light, Standard and High.

The tiers are based on number of emails processed (including spam) so are a reflection not just of how much email you get but how much you put your email address about (e.g. on forum, web pages, news groups, etc). This is also affected by how many aliases you have or whether you have a wildcard alias. Emails to invalid addresses do not count.

We sent out emails this month to people who were not on the Light level of usage. The emails were not worded very well, for which I do apologise. I think you will find the ones sent next month to be a lot clearer.

We are only changing people off a lower tariff to a higher one if you have high usage for three months in a row. Even then the price change does not come in until the next bill. So this is lots of warning.

Are we trying to rip off customers? Of course not! Email is however an expensive business to run, and as you can see by the slow down last week it is not easy to keep on top of it. We had already ordered a new, and very fast, storage server which we hope to install this week. We have a lot of machines doing email (incoming, spam checking, webmail, imap & pop, outgoing all have at least 2 machines). This is more equipment, power, bandwidth, and rack space than any other service - yet for over half of the domains we run we include email free of charge with the broadband and the rest only cost £1/month.

We are keen to include a domain, email and web space with broadband still, but it is not sensible for someone to use the free domain to handle 250,000 emails a month for a company with hundreds of mailboxes and "pay" the same as someone that has a home email address and 100 emails a month, is it?

90% of domains on which we run email are in the Light category which is free with broadband (one domain per site) or £1/month+VAT. A cheap service.

For 9% of domains we handle over 1,000 emails a month and and this is the Standard email service. It is only £5/month even if you have broadband, which is not an expensive email service. Remember it is still unlimited mailboxes.

For 1% of domains we handle over 10,000 emails a month, and these are an handful of companies using our email with, typically, hundreds of staff mailboxes. These will be charged £100/month.

The exact proprtions will change, I am sure, as some people will take email elsewhere and some will stop wildcard mailboxes and so on.

We expect this change will either provide more money to help maintain and run a good quality of service, or move some of the high users again making the service better.

I hope that makes sense, but do feel free to ask me questions in irc.

We have updated the level of email included in the 'Light' tariff to be 1,500.

There are more details on the email tariffs on the following page:
http://www.aaisp.net.uk/broadband-emailhigh.html

Just a reminder for people using IMAP that we have an 'Archive' option. This is set on the Mailbox options on the Domain Control Pages.

The idea being that old messages can be moved in to an archive folder and sorted in to year and month sub folders.

This helps keep your Inbox and Sent Itmes folders optimised as they will have less messages in, meaning opening the Inbox would be quicker.

There are various settings. Please see the Email Archive page on our web site for more information. Do let us know if you have any ideas, send them in to support.

Collecting email by POP3 or IMAP on our 'C' email servers is slow today.

This is something we're aware of and working to resolve. The bottleneck is the storage servers, we are will be replacing this as soon as possible with a new, faster, solution.

(More information has been posted to this post regarding email.)

Background

Due to the recent problems we have with our outgoing mail servers being blacklisted (eg Hotmail), we've taken some steps to reduce the junk email that passes through them.

We've already added extra phish and spam checking.

One reason our servers get blacklisted is due to customers own email servers relaying bounce messages through us. These tend to be messages that the customer server has accepted from the sender, but then decides that it's spam and wants to bounce it back. Which results in our servers relaying bounces (containing spam), to innocent email addresses.

The Change

Over the next day or so, we'll be making a change to our outgoing email servers (smtp.aaisp.net.uk) so that they won't accept email that look like bounces. (ie messages that are from a Null sender, and with a subject line that looks like a bounce)

Workarounds

We would recommend that customers using their own email server a) send email directly using MX records, rather then relay the message on to smtp.aaisp.net.uk and b) don't accept spam and then bounce it.

Do contact Support if you have any questions or concerns.