Idnet, the popular Letchworth based ISP, have been suffering e-mail woes for the last two days with users who have e-mail addresses that end @idnet.com being unable to receive e-mail. Other hosted
e-mail addresses such as those using non idnet.com domains are unaffected.
The problem manifested itself on Wednesday with e-mail arriving slowly following a huge influx of spam which hit the e-mail platform hard. A server restart was performed to restore service back to
normal which resulted in a routine disk check being performed across the RAID filesystem. 50 hours later, and the disk check is still running, with no indication of when it will complete. Idnet
initially thought the check would take just a short while to run, but due to the amount of files present on the server due to how e-mail is stored, it has taken much longer than expected.
Any inbound e-mail is thankfully not being lost, but queued awaiting delivery to the POP3/IMAP server that delivers it to end users. Unsure if the check is at 20% of completion or 99%, Idnet have
chosen to implement backup hardware to restore service and help users get back in touch with their e-mails, although teething problems have also occurred with this. Idnet will be looking into
implementing hot-spare systems that can be failed over to in a matter of minutes should a similar problem affect the service in the future.
Updates on the issue are available on the Idnet Status Page, with further details posted in our forums and at the Idnetters community forums.
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Shame IDnet one of the better ISPs out there lets hope they solve the problem soon
Mail is becoming hard to manage, it used to be one service that an ISP offered, now you need a company that only does mail. The amount of CPU that dealing with spam takes costs lots of money for 1000’s of users. Email services may become the reason ISP costs go up, I can foresee paying £25/month for connectivity, and £30/month for email in the future.
For £5, you can buy web hosting – for my £5, I get 40GB bandwidth/month and 2 GB storage and all the email I need..
got 3 gmail accounts, 6 GB or so space per account, cost to me ? some ad blocked adverts that come up as single line text
I’ve setup a combination of email on our virtual server and accounts at inbox.com and bluebottle.com. The advantage of both Inbox.com and Bluebottle.com is the challenge-response protection against spam. Never a need to check a spam box. Plus Inbox.com offers a free service with 5GB.
gppixelworks – And it’s telling that they have 5 layers before your approval or disaproval of an email address matters. You’re likely losing large amounts of legitimate email.