We’ve had a few customers report that they’re seeing timeouts connecting to eNom’s nameservers, which are what we’re currently using to serve the ijnet.net domain.  We aren’t seeing that on any of our networks here, but it’s possible there may be some type of networking issue on a backbone somewhere that’s causing this to happen to certain areas of the world. This is likely contributing to the issues we’ve been seeing regarding name resolution from certain providers.

We’ve switched to a new DNS provider and have put the change in place, though it may take up to 24 hours for the switchover to happen fully.  We will be monitoring the change over the next day to make sure there are no issues.  When it appears to be fully (or close to it, anyway) complete, we’ll post here to let you know so you can check to see if it resolves the issues some networks have been seeing.

After some further research, we’re still pretty confident that any DNS issues that are being experienced are not on our end.  From everything we can see, our DNS servers are all responding properly and are returning the proper IP addresses for our gateways.

A recent DNS cache poisoning vulnerability was announced in the last few weeks, and there are reports of it being exploited in the wild.  US-CERT VU#800113 contains details of the vulnerability.  We do not know whether this may be impacting certain ISPs DNS servers, but it is a supposition based on the evidence we have available to us at this time.

To show that our DNS is working properly, we’ve used DNS Stuff to compile a report for each of our gateways showing that all the root DNS servers list our DNS servers as authoritative and that each of our DNS servers is returning the proper response for our gateway addresses.  Click the link for each gateway to see the report.  You can use this report when talking with an ISP about them resolving the issue.

MF1

MF2

G1

G2

We’ve been receiving reports of people with email addresses @aol.com and @aim.com having trouble sending mail to domains protected by our service.  We’ve been researching and troubleshooting and have come to the conclusion that this must be an internal AOL issue.  In short, AOL’s mail servers are saying that they can’t resolve the DNS entries to get an IP address for our gateways.  We’ve tested our DNS from multiple locations on multiple networks and can find no problems.

We just got off the phone with AOL, who was completely unhelpful, unfortunately.  The specifically said the only thing that can be done is for the people with AOL email addresses to contact AOL support to have them look into it.  Apparently AOL’s Postmaster group only handles mail that AOL receives, not their outbound mail, and there is no way for a service provider like us to get into contact with the group that handles AOL’s OUTBOUND mail.  It’s up to the individual AOL users to address their issues with support.

Not really the answer we wanted to hear.  Unfortunately, it appears that the users who have AOL addresses need to contact AOL support to ask them to look into it.

Beginning today and continuing through Wednesday, Easy Antispam telephone support will be available on a very limited basis.  All critical issues should be communicated through email to support@easyantispam.com.

If you are attending HostingCon 2008, be sure to stop by booth 712 and visit Ken and The Protection Girls.  We will be giving away the first official Easy Antispam T-shirts!  Also be sure to get your drink tickets for the party at the W!!

As Ken posted earlier, we’re throwing a party at HostingCon 2008!

We’d love it if our customers could join us at the party.  If you’re attending HostingCon and would like to join us at the W Hotel for our party, please RSVP to the event we posted on Upcoming so that we can reserve your drink tickets for you.

We’ll hold them at our booth #712 for you to pick up on Tuesday.

The database issue with our G1 Gateway has been resolved, and normal mail flow has resumed.