We're looking into problems with our 'H' mail server.

IMAP and POP3 are unaffected but this will be affecting some webmail access.

A reboot of the server fixed it.

One of our mail servers is down. This will be affecting webmail (specifically RoundCube).

We're working on it.

Back up. Checking that services are running as expected.

All looks normal now.

One of our webmail servers is a little unhappy, and customer are seeing timeouts and long loading times when using webmail.

This is being looked in to.

New hardware has been ordered to replace this server.

We've altered the webmail server so that customers who normally get redirected the to 'G' webmail server are now being directed to the 'H' webmail server.

Customers do not need to change anything at their end.

Do let us know if this improves webmail for you for the time being.

Our web mail servers are currently offline, this is being looked in to at the moment.

The service is back up after a reboot, we'll monitor and investigate the cause of this outage.

Our backup SMTP relay tertiary-mx.co.uk is currently not accepting email. This is only a minor problem as it should only be used if it's the backup MX for your own server and your own server is down.

We're investigating.

Now sorted, and our monitoring's been improved to make problems on tertiary-mx.co.uk easier to spot in future.

There is currently a problem on our customer facing 'H' mail server, affecting access to webmail (and possibly some IMAP/POP3 depending on client settings).

We are investigating.

Sorry, this affects roundcube everywhere! It's running again now on the H server.

We're still working on G.

Sorry, working again now but rebooting the server in a few minutes.

It's all back now. Please contact support if you are still seeing problems.

There was a minor problem fixed on Saturday. No further reports of problems, so all fixed now.

One of our webmail servers is currently being rebooted due to a faulty disk. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The server is back up.

Two of the servers that are part of our outgoing mail relay (smtp.aa.net.uk or smtp.aaisp.net.uk) appear to be on a blacklist.

We are investigating the cause of this and working to get this resolved soon 

We have found the cause and stopped email from the mailbox in question.

We are now in the process of removing any queued mail from this user and will then request the servers are removed from the blacklist. 

We've taken the affected mail servers out of DNS in the mean time.

The servers are no longer being black listed and are back in DNS.

We're restarting the 'H' webmail server as it's not very happy at the moment.

service restored

One of the servers that is part of our out going mail relay (smtp.aa.net.uk or smtp.aaisp.net.uk) has just suffered from a disk problem.

We've taken this server out of the pool, and will take 10 minutes for the DNS to update.

If you have problems sending email, please try again in 10 minutes. If still not working, then it maybe that your email program has remembered the old server and may need to be restarted.

The server is rebuilding it's RAID. We'll leave it out of service for the time being whilst we investigate.

Email in the queue is being processed, no email has been lost.

Email service should now be OK.

Our outbound mail servers are occasionally refusing to send email with the error "Sender verify failed". This doesn't appear to be affecting many customers. We are investigating.

We're making changes to try and identify/resolve the underlying problem.

Still doesn't seem to be affecting many customers.

We've tracked this down to a peculiar DNS problem on one of our resolvers in the Maidenhead datacentre. 

We will carry on monitoring this, but it should be 'resolved'.

The 'D' email server will have one of its disks changed on Friday afternoon Monday at 5pm and will require a reboot. We expect this to take around 10 minutes.

This is being moved to Monday

This work is about to start.

The server is back online.

And is off again. Working on it.

After changing the disk the server was rebooted a second time and has failed to boot up. Datacentre staff have been tasked to investigate.

The Server is booting up now.

The server is rebuilding its RAID array, but is up and functioning. We're sorry for the inconvenience this caused.

Rebuild complete - it should be fine now.

One of our POP3/IMAP servers is experiences high load, engineers are looking in to it, but some customers may be seeing error messages in their email programs.

Load is down to a sensible level now, staff will monitor the server

There was a problem on one of the outgoing email servers this morning. This has been resolved and we're looking in to the cause.

Rumours that we had in fact moved the mail servers to Translybonia to reduce expenses are greatly exaggerated. - (It was actually a database problem.)

Hotmail have decided to black list one of our email server IP addresses. We've taken it off line for the moment.

customer who have had bounce back messages from hotmail/live.com should resend them in an hours time.

One of the servers has been taken out of the 'pool'.

One of our webmail servers is off line at the moment, this will affect some of our email users from accessing it's web pages.

We expect service to resume shortly though and will update this post again.

This server (The G Mail server) is being rebooted.

Server rebooted, and back online.

We've have a few incidents this week where Hotmail have been blacklisting some of our IPs.

This has meant that some email has been bounced back.

We believe this is resolved, for now, so please do resend messages that have been bounced back,

We'll carry on monitoring the situation

We have a backlog of email that is currently being processed. This would mean that some email over the past 24 hours may be delayed.

There is an issue on the A mail server. We're investigating.

If you have any questions please contact support - it would be best to move to our newer mail system.

Mail services back up now. It looks like some email on the A server may have been lost.

Apologies for any inconvenience.

We strongly recommend moving to the C mail servers; A is a legacy server and will be turned off at some point in the future.

We are needing to reboot the legacy email server, A.Hopeless, now.

Sorry for the short notice, it should be back within 10 minutes.

Server has been rebooted, and is back online.

At about 6:20am our legacy email server, B.Hopeless, stopped responding to our monitoring. We are investigating what the problem is and will update this post shortly.

Customers on this server will be unable to collect email at the moment.

A remote power cycle has not brought the server back. Data centre staff have been tasked to the server.

The server hardware does not look well. We are attempting to move the disks to another machine.

B.Hopeless is booting up on new hardware. It will take a little while longer for the smtp and pop3 services to be started.

Services have started, and the server is running. Staff will monitor the server.

Please do contact support to have your domain moved on to the new email servers.

Original hardware had died. Disks moved to new hardware and booted up.

Our legacy, A, email server has a file system problem. Access to email on the server won't be possible for the time being.

We hope to have this back up as soon as  possible, but no eta at the moment.

We strongly encourage customers on this server ask support to move them on the the 'C' email server.

This is just affecting POP3 collection on the A email server. Outgoing email is unaffected. 

Staff in the datacentre have been unable to boot the server due to file system errors.

Our plan is to build a new server, from backup, on new hardware in the Maidenhead datacentre.

This will take some time to do, but we are able to move customer on to the new email servers - please contact support who will be able to assist.

We'll update this post every couple of hours with progress, we hope to have the server running by the end of the day though.

We do appologise for this, most customers have been moved off this server in the past few years since we introduced the new email servers.

Are my emails lost? 

(Short answer: probably not. Long answer follows...)

Emails to your domain are normally in 1 of 2 places:

a) On our server, waiting for you to collect (or to be relayed on to your server)
b) In your email program, as you've already downloaded them from the server.

As the server is broken, new emails sent to you will be on either:
a) The broken server
b) On the server of the person sending you the email (as they have been unable to send them on to our broken server)

Emails on our server are backed up overnight, and we are restoring these at the moment.

Looking at the logs we have, it looks like the server stopped accepting emails sometime before 11pm, 9th March. Our latest backup completed at 3am, 10th March. So emails should not be lost. Once the server has been rebuilt, emails will be accessible again.

Emails that are on the senders server will be queued, and they will wait until the broken server is back up, or support have moved you to the new email server.

The ideal way forward for you is to move your domain on to the new email servers.

Staff are still working on building the replacement server. So far the progress has been good - in respect to copying files and databases etc.

There is still work to be done, but we hope to have the server running by the end of the day.

We are close to getting this working. We are sorting out problems caused by the age of the email server software and getting it to run on a new operating system.

The server appears to be working now. POP3 collections have resumed, queued email on the server will be retried. - it is being closly monitored.

Please do contact support if you have any problems, and please contact support to move your domain off this legacy server.

This has been completed.

The old server had disk and file system faults - it was decided that it would be quicker to build a new server (new hardware, new operating system) and data from backup, and also locate the new server in our Maidenhead datacentre.

The new server has new IP addresses as follows:

81.187.30.15
2001:8b0:0:30::51bb:1ef

(However, this information shouldn't be needed as DNS names should be used)

One of our webmail servers is currently being rebooted, we'll expect it to be back on line shortly, after we investigate what happened to the server to stop it responding.

The server is now back online.

We'll be upgrading the software on some of our email servers this weekend. As we have multiple servers this should not be noticed by customers.

This work has been completed.

There was a temporary problem accessing Squirrelmail a few minutes ago. This has been resolved. We were moving the 'preference' files over to a new file server and missed a couple of the file permissions. We do apologise.

Resolved.

One of our legacy email server, a.hopeless, is not responding on the network at the moment.

We have asked datacentre staff to investigate/reboot.

If you are using this server as your primary mail server or as a backup MX record, then please do contact support staff how can asist your move on to our new servers.

Rebooted and back online.

There is a problem with webmail system for some users at the moment.

We are investigating, and expect it to be fixed soon.

This is not affecting all webmail users.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

This has been resolved.

Restored configuration files.

Hotmail are not liking our outgoing email servers, and are bouncing email we try to send to them (even though we do lots of phishing/spam checking on outgoing mail).

We are trying to work out why they are not liking our servers, but are also configuring our servers to use a different IP address if you use authentication when sending email through our servers (smtp.aaisp.net.uk)

We've put in a work around and mail to Hotmail is being accepted.

We'll monitor this, and will also put in place other measures to help this from happening in the first place.

We're still seeing problems in relaying message to Hotmail as well as some other hosts (eg BT Internet/Yahoo).

We are working on this at a number of levels,

1. More tracking down and blocking of customers who are trying to send junk (typically customer with viruses sending spam/phishing email, and customer bouncing messages)
2. Giving our mail servers additional IP addresses to use (this will include IPs in the 81.187.30.x and 90.155.4.x blocks)

Email to Hotmail/Yahoo is currently being accepted. Mail is currently going out via B.painless using it's usual 81.187.30.52 IP. (Customers don't need to change anything, carry on using smtp.aaisp.net,uk as your smtp server). We've block and contacted some some customers who were sending junk messages.

We'll carry on monitoring this.

Relaying to hotmal etc, has been ok for the past few days. We'll carry on monitoring this though.