News & Information

Email Upgrades: Using your own DNS?

If you are using your own DNS, you must change your MX record in order for the mail upgrades to properly complete. If you are using the regular Domain Direct DNS, you don't need to do anything - we'll take care of these messy details for you.

The fix is simple, just add the following records to your zone file, replacing the old ones.

MX Record:

domain.tld 8H IN MX 10 mx.domain.tld.cust.hostedemail.com

The CNAME entries should look like this:

mail.domain.tld IN CNAME mail.domain.tld.cust.hostedemail.com
smtp.domain.tld IN CNAME smtp.domain.tld.cust.hostedemail.com

Just replace "domain.tld" for your domain name, i.e.

mail.byte.org IN CNAME mail.byte.org.cust.hostedemail.com
smtp.byte.org IN CNAME smtp.byte.org.cust.hostedemail.com

etc.

This is an unsupported configuration (i.e. managing a zone file hosted by another DNS provider) but if you have questions, we'll try and do our best.

General Email Upgrade Update

Opera/Safari Support: Finally, the basic webmail option supports Safari and Opera users! Yay! I'm extremely pleased that this has been addressed by the development team. As a Mac user myself, it drove me batty to type in the URL of my webmail only to be reminded that my favorite browser wasn't supported. If you are using either of these browsers, you will automatically be logged into the basic webmail interface as the standard version that uses AJAX/DHTML is not yet compatible with either of these browsers.

Domain Direct Upgrade: Thankfully, we are almost done. We are upgrading the last two batches of customers this weekend starting Friday night and going until Mid-day Saturday. Once completed, all customers will have had their accounts upgraded - most without incident. Someone mentioned in the comments that we should have been clearer in our upgrade notices to customers who are not using Domain Direct for DNS. Definitely a great point. I will be making a separate post outlining what steps you will need to take to update your DNS to make sure that your upgrade goes smoothly.

Netidentity: It looks like we will be starting the upgrade on December 5. It will need to happen over a period of a few days. These details will be ironed out and we will start sending out notices to all of our NetIdentity clients detailing the timing and impacts very shortly.

Webmail speed: The hosted email team is implementing some server side compression that should make the webmail client perform snappier. This upgrade will be happening on Saturday shortly after the final Domain Direct upgrade occurs.

Spam filter changes: Later on today the hosted email team will be updating the way that messages marked as spam get stored in your spam folders. Right now, the webmail system relies on a filter to move this mail around. With the update later today, this will be performed transparently.

More updates will come as I get more information.

Domain Direct and NetIdentity Email Update

I just wanted to update everyone on the timelines for the coming email upgrades. The old mail systems have been behaving very badly for the past couple of weeks causing some serious disruptions to all of our customers. Rather than trying to fight with this system as it continues to fall over, we are working up a plan to accelerate the final upgrades for the remaining 25,000 Domain Direct customers who haven't been upgraded to the new system yet.

Currently, we are working out the details to ensure that the Domain Direct email upgrade is completed no later than next weekend, but there is a chance that we might be able to complete the move this weekend. We will keep you notified via email if your account is affected in any way.

The NetIdentity upgrade is still on track to complete on or before December 7th. We are still working out some final details concerning the timing, but we are still on track to meet our goal of communicating the final details and dates of the upgrades to you next week. These details will come via email and outline to you exactly what the scope of the upgrade is and what action, if any, you will need to take to help things go smoothly. This is the second and final phase of the NetIdentity email upgrade.

We will continue to provide updates via the blog and answer any questions or comments to the best of our ability. We are slightly behind in answering customer service inquiries. This largely stems from the volume of questions that we're seeing about using the new mail system, coupled with the cleanup questions that we're getting as a result of the old mail system failures over the past couple of weeks. Right now, the telephone hold time is approximately 15 minutes on average and there are approximately 1500 customer service email tickets open at any given time (meaning that when you send us an email, 1500 people will get an answer before you. This process usually takes 3-4 days). Customers asking questions about outages that have already been resolved may not receive a priority answer as the customer service team is focused on helping those clients that have current questions about the service.

I hope this helps clarify some of the work going on behind the scenes.

A note about comments...

I just wanted to write a quick note about the use of comments here on the blog. It can be frustrating when a service you have paid good money for isn't working - especially when it happens repeatedly. I get that. Completely. One of the reasons we set this blog up in the first place was to make sure that we gave our customers a decent way to give us unfiltered feedback directly. The blog has been a great success in this regard.

What isn't cool is when the venting and frustration turns into personal attacks. I really try hard to maintain a hands-off approach to the comments, but I do want it to be known that we are moderating people who have crossed the line with personal attacks against our staff, have repeatedly posted things that are clearly not true and other similarly libelous or slanderous things. Since we started this blog, I've only banned two folks and set three others to "moderated" status so that their comments can be reviewed by our staff before they are posted publicly. I added a fourth person to the moderated group today, so I thought it was only fair to reiterate our philosophy on comments.

If your comments are being moderated, it means that your comments won't show up immediately and we may never approve them for public posting.

Regular comments for the vast majority of the blog readers are not being moderated in any way.

Email Access Back Online (non-upgraded clients only) + Domain Direct Services.

*** All services have been restored ***

Our registrar provider (Tucows) has identified the problem as being a load balancing issue which was caused by a significantly higher level of network traffic.  The systems that were affected include: URL and Sub-Domain Forwarding, Blogware (Blog Identity accounts) and WHOIS Lookups. 

A reboot of the Email System to help resolve the "Too many sessions open, please try later" error on the old mail system was interrupted by the Tucows outage that was experienced earlier today.  Email delivery was queued remotely so no email will be lost.  We apologize for the interruption of these services our customers experienced today.

A reboot of the Email services on the old mail system is currently in progress as we attempt to resolve the original issue below.  This will affect Webmail access, POP & IMAP access and Email Forwarding.

  Additionally our Registrar provider (Tucows) is currently experiencing an outage which will affect the following Domain Direct services:  WHOIS Lookups, URL & Sub-domain Forwarding, BLOG Identity (Blogware).  This will be treated with the highest priority so we can expect services to resume shortly.

We are currently experiencing webmail access issues with our older mail system. Customers on this system will receive the error "Too many sessions open, please try later" when trying to log into their Webmail Interface. Our Email administrators have been notified and we are hoping to have this resolved as soon as possible. Email delivery is NOT affected. POP/IMAP access is still available. We apologize for this inconvenience.

Upgraded Mail System - Webmail Access Issues.

The intermittent "Session Expired" webmail error is now resolved. If you are still experiencing this error please contact us by email or phone. (http://www.domaindirect.com/supportform.html or 1-866-337-8633)

Clients currently on the upgraded mail system may intermittently encounter the error "Session Expired" when trying to access their webmail using the standard interface. The basic interface setting will allow you access webmail but may fail if you open, move or delete any emails. Our Email Administration team is currently looking into the issue and is considered a high priority. We apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing.

Webmail Access Temporarily Offline - Upgraded System.

Webmail access has been restored.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Customers on the upgraded mail system accessing email via the Webmail Interface will currently receive an error "Service is unavailable, try again later." when trying to log in.  Our Email Administration team has been notified and we hope to have this resolved as soon as possible.  POP/IMAP access is still available and email delivery to your mailbox will not be affected.

***Note:  This does not affect those using the Net Identity service or Domain Direct clients that have not yet been upgraded.

Net Identity Email Sending/Receiving problems from 7AM EST to 9AM EST

There were some network issues with our email servers this morning which caused intermittent problems with sending and receiving.  The emails that were sent to you during that time would have either been queued and delivered shortly after the issue was repaired, or bounced back to the sender.  If the email was bounced to the sender they will be able to resend the message at this time.  All email on the servers is fine and the accounts remained accessible through webmail.

We apologize for any problems this has caused, it looks like it was an isolated problem with the network and we don't expect it to re-occur.

E-Mail System Maintenance Notice

When: Saturday November 10th @ 11pm EST to Sunday November 11th @ 3am EST

Webmail will not be available for Domain Direct customers that have been upgraded to the new Domain Direct E-Mail system for 1 - 2 hours during this maintenance window.

For the remainder of the maintenance, webmail customers may experience intermittent login issues.  IMAP and POP3 may be intermittently unavailable for the duration of the window.  Inbound and outbound mail will continue to flow.

This maintenance will be to put in place the new webmail features that Ross spoke about in the New Webmail Features & Upgrade News post.  You will also find that after the maintenance the fully featured webmail that is currently being used, will be loading faster when you login.

Domain Direct Email Service Disruption.

Webmail/POP/SMTP/IMAP access has been restored. Email sent during the outage has been queued and will be delivered normally.  Once again we apologize for the disruption and we will continue to work on upgrading all existing customers from the current mail platform to our new mail platform.

Customers (on the older mail system) will experience connection issues while connecting to their email accounts via POP, IMAP and Webmail.  Our system administration team has located the problem, however, the repair time cannot be estimated at this point due to an emergency issue which has required us to restart the primary back-end server to fully restore the service.  During this time, customers will not have access to their mailboxes and mail will be queued remotely.  This is considered a management priority and we hope to have this resolved as soon as possible.  Please check back on this BLOG Page or our Network Status page (http://www.domaindirect.com/network.html) for updates.  We do apologize for any inconvenience this is causing.

**Note:  This outage does not affect Net Identity customers or Domain Direct customers that have been upgraded to the new Mail System.