Some of you may have noticed that the Report Center was showing no data for the last 5 or 6 days.  We’ve been working to correct the issue and I’m happy to report that it’s been corrected.

Reports from yesterday are now available and new report data will be available after midnight tonight.

We’ve been monitoring the new gateways since we put them in place and moved traffic over to them.  They’re running very smoothly and everything is working as expected.  If you have any questions about the migration please contact our support department.

The new gateways (replacements for MF1 and MF2) are now in place and the DNS records have been updated to point to the new IP addresses.

mf1.ijnet.net is now 216.246.89.41

mf2.ijnet.net is now 216.246.89.42

It may take some time for these changes to propogate throughout the Internet, but the “old” MF1 and MF2 are both still up and running on their original IP addresses so they will continue to process mail until we see that there is negligible mail flowing through them.

The migration scheduled for tonight has been postponed until tomorrow night.  Same information applies, just postponed one day.

Somewhere between 9pm and 11:59pm central time tonight, 8/13/2007, we will be migrating MF1 and MF2 to new gateway appliances.  This migration process will involve simply changing the DNS entries for mf1.ijnet.net and mf2.ijnet.net to point to the new IP addresses of the new gateways once the gateways have been installed and the configuration migrated.

This migration will not cause any downtime or outages and will be virtually seemless, with no changes required on your part.  The old gateways will remain up and running for several days to allow for the DNS changes to propogate.

NOTE: If you are using your own custom DNS entry as your MX records that point to the IP address of our gateway, these will need to be updated.  We will provide the new IP addresses of the gateways once they are up and online.

Please contact support@easyantispam.com or call 1-888-NOSPAM9 (1-888-667-7269) if you have any questions.

We’ve noticed that some of our customers are using “Sender Verify Callout” on their mail servers, which is a system which takes the sender’s email address of an incoming message and tries to verify that it’s a valid email address by going to the mail server of the sender’s domain and doing an SMTP transaction to verify it.

While normally this would not be an issue, there is a situation where using this process on your mail servers that are protected by Easy Antispam can cause problems.

Here’s the situation:

1. A spam message slips through our filters (while we try to block them all, some do get through)
2. Our gateway attempts to send the message to your server
3. Your server does “sender verify callout” on the sender’s email address; it fails
4. Your server issues a 550 response rejecting the message
5. Our gateway, because your server rejected the message, thinks that the “to” address doesn’t exist, because it’s the same error number that’s used in that situation
6. Our gateway caches the state of the “to” email address for 1 hour, rejecting all mail to that user during that time period

If you’re seeing periodic, sporadic situations where mail to a specific user is being rejected for about an hour, this is probably the reason why.  This is why it’s a bad idea to use “sender verify callout” with Easy Antispam.