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December 24th: 8am to 5pm EST
December 25th: Closed
December 26th: Closed
December 27th: 9am to 5pm EST
December 28th: 9am to 5pm EST
December 29th: Closed
December 30th: Closed
December 31st: 9am to 5pm EST
January 1st: Closed
Happy Holidays Everyone!
We are very excited to introduce our new online Customer Service Center at http://help.DomainDirect.com for both Domain Direct and NetIdentity customers. It will help us continue what was started with this blog; making sure that our customers can contact us, quickly get information about the services that they have with us and give us feedback about everything we do.
A few points from the email we are sending out to all customers:
The Customer Service Center makes it easy to submit all of your information to us in a secure environment, and monitor the progress we make with your questions as closely as you would like without having to deal with email at all. It even lets you re-open old issues, or close issues that have been resolved already. Instead of deciding for you, we let you determine when an issue is resolved.
If you have an open issue with us, don't worry. All previous issues are carried over to the new Customer Service Center and all tickets that are not closed are still being worked on by Customer Service Representatives. This also means that you may already have a Customer Service Center account.
If you have sent us an email inquiry in the past 3 months, you likely already have a Customer Service Center account. To access your account please go to http://help.DomainDirect.com, and then click on lost password on the right hand side. Then enter in the email address that you used to send your original question to us and we will send you the automatically generated password for your account to that email address. From then on your Customer Service Center username is the email address you used.
If you have not sent us a question recently, you can just as easily sign up for a Customer Service Center account by clicking on the Register link on the main page and filling out the information for a new account. You will then have to validate your email address using a link we will send to your email address so you can activate the account.
With any change there needs to be guidance, so we have created a special Knowledge Base category with answers specifically about the Customer Service Center itself. Just go to http://help.DomainDirect.com and click on the Knowledge Base link, and then click on the "Support Center Help" category on the right hand side.
I'm looking forward to hearing your comments about this new system and finding ways of using it to help all of our customers. If you have any questions about the system, feel free to send us a ticket with the new system.
Earlier today, the last of the mail from the old system was moved to the new system. We have now successfully moved all customer accounts and email from the old system to the upgraded system. Thank you very much for your patience during this upgrade. We will continue to update this blog as we work through the final cleanup and other items, so please continue to ask your questions about the new system or any other improvements that we make along the way.
NetIdentity Upgrade
Later on today, we are moving the final batch of data for all remaining customers. This work will run throughout the evening and into tomorrow morning. By this time tomorrow, all customers should have all of their data located in their inbox on the new mail system. Once we have confirmed this, we will be removing access to "mailarchive.netidentity.com". There is some additional cleanup work that will continue throughout the remainder of this week related to the upgrade, but for all intents and purposes, the upgrade will be completed by tomorrow as far as what our customers will see.
General Bug Fixes and Features Launching Today
The email development team has scheduled a software upgrade for later today that will see the following bugs fixed and minor features implemented.
New Webmail Features:
Webmail Bug Fixes:
These features and fixes will be available to All NetIdentity and Domain Direct customers who have moved to the new mail system. As always, please let us know if you have any comments or questions.
All customer accounts have been successfully upgraded to the new email system, but there are a few areas that bear some further explanation. I hope this helps clarify the situation and answers many of the questions that you've asked in the comments section.
Logging into MailArchive:
There has been some confusion about logging into the MailArchive. If you are using a web browser, you may click on the button in the top left hand corner of your webmail interface. If this does not, as we have seen with some Safari users, you may login to the archive by going directly to "http://mailarchive.netidentity.com" and logging in using your old email settings. For myself, I would have to use the following credentials:
username: ross
domain: rader.net
password: *******
You MUST replace the default domain with your own from your email address (i.e. rader.net, smith.net, etc.) or you will not be able to login.
You may login to MailArchive via IMAP by pointing your IMAP client at "mail.archive.netidentity.com" and logging in with your username and password for your email account.
Logging into your New Email:
Logging into your new email via POP, IMAP or Webmail requires you to use your full email address as your username (i.e. ross@rader.net in my case) and your existing email password. The following settings will work for you:
Webmail: http://webmail.{{yourdomain}} i.e. http://webmail.rader.net
POP: getmail.{{yourdomain}} i.e. getmail.rader.net
IMAP: getmail.{{yourdomain}} i.e. getmail.rader.net
SMTP: sendmail.{{yourdomain}} i.e. sendmail.rader.net
If these do not work for some reason, you may also replace any of them with "mail.netidentity.com" This also works for webmail by pointing your browser at http://mail.netidentity.com.
Where's my data? How come my email has the wrong date on it?
As of this writing, data for the first 20,000 customers has been moved to the new system. In some cases, the dates on your email may have been reset. We have identified the cause of this issue and will fix it for everyone over the next couple of days. This will not be an issue for any additional customers that we are moving over.
I asked Customer Service a question, but they haven't responded yet. What is going on?
The Customer Service team is working full time to ensure that everyone gets their questions answered. Right now, they have approximately 3000 questions in the queue at any given time which means that there will be a delay in getting you an answer. If you have an absolutely urgent question, please contact us directly via telephone. The hold times are fairly long right now, but all calls are being answered as quickly as possible.
Why was the system so slow yesterday and why was it giving me a "Service Unavailable" error?
The root cause of this was a bug in one of the hardware load balancers. Once we identified the source of the issue, service was quickly restored to normal quality levels. The bug had nothing to do with the email upgrade project, but its timing was very unfortunate. Monitoring and use overnight indicates that the issue has been fully resolved. We do not expect this to be an issue going forward. This is a terrible way to introduce you to our new system, but I am pleased that our team was able to fix the issue this quickly.
I will be back in town later today and hopefully better available to answer your questions directly this evening and over the weekend. Thanks for your patience through this upgrade. I really believe that you will be quite happy with the results.
At long last, the NetIdentity email upgrades are finally being rolled out. Things are going exceptionally well so far and all user accounts have been enabled on this new system and the DNS has been switched over. This means that the next time you login to your email (webmail or otherwise) you will be using our new system.
We are now in the process of moving all of the data over from the old system. This only affects customers who had mail stored in their webmail or IMAP accounts. For POP users, the upgrade is de facto complete. Moving this data will run us through the beginning of next week. Our plan is to have this work completed by Tuesday.
There is one small point of confusion related to accessing your archived IMAP email and webmail. You can get to the archived data by visiting "http://mailarchive.netidentity.com" in your web browser. The login is the exact same as your old Netidentity webmail login - i.e. you must put in your username (ross), your domain (netidentity.com) and your password (youactuallythoughtIwasgoingtoincludemypassword?) in the login box. The confusion comes from the data that is displayed on the old login screen which shows a default domain of "mail.archive.netidentity.com". You must change this the domain name you use for your email (i.e. rader.net or smith.net, etc.) before you will be able to login.
I am out of town until Friday, but I will be keeping an eye on things and try to answer your questions as quickly as possible. Our customer service team is already working overtime to make sure that you get your inquiries answered in a reasonable timeframe.
This problem has been isolated and fixed by the hosted email team. It is worth noting that the team was able to respond to this issue in a very timely manner simply because of the level of control they have over the capabilities of the new email system. This issue should not repeat itself moving forward. You may see this error message again in the future however, as it is generally spawned by the Webmail system as a general sort of error encountered by the system. This wasn't a great introduction to the new system, but I am pleased at how quickly it has been put behind us.
Both NetIdentity and Domain Direct customers may see errors when logging into their Web Mail. We are currently having an issue with the Web Mail that will display a "Service not avaliable" message intermittently when you attempt to log in.
This situation has been escalated to our email administration team who are working on resolving this issue as I type this. If you do see this error message please try logging in again a few times and you will be able to get into your Web Mail. If you see an error logging into IMAP, try re-connecting to the server and your connection will get through.
The problem is with one of the authentication systems and since we have over a dozen of them the error only shows when you happen to hit that one authentication system that is having a problem. This is only for Web Mail and IMAP, POP3 access is not affected.
I'm pleased to pass along that we have successfully completed 99% of the Domain Direct email upgrades. The primary purpose of this upgrade was to move you from an aging email system that Tucows first deployed in 2001 (known internally as CGP), onto our brand new platform, codenamed "Firefly". Now known simply as "Tucows Email Service", we started the development and implementation of this system in October of last year, partly in response to the failure of our existing system to handle the requirements of our NetIdentity customers. This failure lead to the NetIdentity Migration Nightmare of 2006 which I'm sure I don't need to rehash for anyone here :-)
Why all the excitement about 99%? Originally, our Domain Direct customers were on two different email systems (there's a long boring story why) Even with the upgrade complete for our customers on one of those systems, there are still a very small number of Domain Direct customers that are on another mail system entirely (known internally as CP2.5). If you are one of these customers, your accounts will be upgraded after we complete the NetIdentity upgrades starting next week. We decided it was best to complete the migrations on a system by system basis, rather than a service by service basis.
I really want to thank our professional services, email development and operations teams as well as our customer service staff for making this go as smoothly as possible. More importantly, I'd like to thank you, our customers, for putting up with the failing Domain Direct and NetIdentity mail systems for as long as you have. Your patience is immense and incredibly appreciated. We have a long way to go to make this up to you, but with a stable and reliable mail system in our arsenal, I think we have a fighting chance of starting to impress you with our service capabilities.
This has since been fixed. The issue is due to a known issue with the Webmail system. The bug at the root of the issue will be fixed in an upcoming release. In the meantime, we will be keep an especially close eye on this issue. The good news is that because the new email system is completely under our control (i.e. it is a system that we implemented, not a proprietary system purchased from a third party) we are in a position to be much more responsive when it comes to fixing these types of issues. As with any new piece of software, I am certain that we will find bug here and there, but I am pleased at how quickly they are being fixed since we moved to this new system. - ross
Clients on the new mail system may intermittently experience the following error: "Service is unavailable, try again later." or "We were unable to perform your request, please try again." when logging into their webmail interface. Our email administration team has been notified and are currently investigating this issue. We apologize for any inconvenience this might be causing.
