We will be replacing and upgrading our power distribution unit (PDU) tonight at midnight, 7/18/2008 00:00 Central (CDT).  This change will cause an approximate 10 minute total outage of all of our services, including the following:

• Easy Antispam Gateways - mail sent during this brief outage will queue on the sending server and be retried when our gateways come back up
• easyantispam.com - Main website, billing system, account manager, support system… all web properties.
• Telephone system - Our main telephone switch will be unavailable, causing our main numbers to not be available. Please call 224-558-3907 for emergencies only during this outage window.

This upgrade is being done to more reliably provide power distribution to our servers and better handle power utilization spikes.

This morning at approximately 7:00am central time, we experienced a power failure in our cabinet at our datacenter, causing loss of connectivity to our servers.  This issue was caused by a severe increase in power consumption by some of our equipment, causing our power distribution unit to shut down due to more power being drawn than it could handle.

Connectivity was restored at approximately 8:15am and all gateways are functioning properly at this time.

We’re investigating the cause of the increased power usage and have an order in for a PDU that will handle larger power loads in case of situations like this.  We will need to take a short planned maintenance when that new PDU arrives in order to install it.

As some of you may remember, we experienced a similar issue in May.  The unit we experienced the issue with in May was replaced by our datacenter technicians with a new PDU of the same make and model that was in stock as a replacement part.  We had determined at the time that the PDU itself likely had a problem, which was why we replaced it.

MailFoundry has pushed a new set of spam updates that corrects the problem that was causing the caching of mail and mail is once again flowing smoothly through the gateways.

We’re experiencing some caching of mail on our gateways at this time due to what appears to be a bad spam or virus definition.  MailFoundry techs are currently working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.  We will post again when we have an update, which should be shortly.

Last night we experienced a complete infrastructure power outage due to a problem with a power distribution unit that delivers power to our cabinet at our datacenter.  Unfortunately, it took some time to diagnose exactly what particular piece of equipment was causing the problem and then to resolve the issue.

The problem has been resolved at this time, however, we will need to schedule a short downtime in the next week or so to upgrade a piece of power hardware to reduce the chances of an outage like this happening again in the future.

By way of apology for the extended downtime, we will be issuing $10 service credits for all ServerProtect customers and $2 service credits for all DomainProtect customers.  This credit will appear in your account in the next week or so.

As many of you are aware, we have been having problems with our cleveland server, which houses the Quarantine System and the Account Manager.  We had done some drive repairing which temporarily helped things, but the drive in that server was failing.

I’m happy to announce that tonight we brought a new replacement cleveland server online.  All quarantine and account manager processes are now housed on the new server, which is much more powerful and robust than the previous server.

Please keep an eye on both the Account Manager and the Quarantine System over the next week or so and let us know if you notice anything not working.  We’re pretty sure that we got everything configured properly, but we might have missed something.

Thank you for your patience while we dealt with this issue.