Wrightsites.com Hosting Blog

Early on February 9, 2010, we experienced a problem with our Trouble Ticket System. After adding an address that had been spamming our ticket system to the blacklist, the tech support system went berserk and began reopening trouble tickets from as far back as three years ago and emailing the customers. The problem was noted and corrected within five minutes, but the system had already reopened several hundred tickets and and sent out the email for each of them. We sincerely apologize for any confusion and inconvenience that this may have caused.

Well the stats have been in and we've been analyzing to look for trends in the spam game.  Here is what our Mr. GoodMail system did in 2009:

12,984,817 email messages passed through for our users
12,295,533 email messages were quarantined as spam
           8,707 email messages contained a virus and were deleted
     680,577 email messages were considered valid and passed to our users

Some interesting trends that we have noted:

- The number of valid messages has increased steadily as new customers have moved to our system.
- Total email messages coming into the system have fluctuated wildly.  When high profile spammers are shut down (which is often newsworthy), we typically see a well defined drop in total messages for 2-3 months.
- The number of virus-infected messages has grown quickly over the past six months.  In the fourth quarter, Mr. GoodMail processed 10-times the number of virus messages as in the second quarter.  Preliminary numbers for January show this trend continuing.
- We noted six false-positives in 2009. These messages were mistakenly marked as spam and quarantined.  Since they were in quarantine, users could still access the mail.  This equates to a rate of one false positive per 2.16 million messages processed.  While we would like to see that reduced to zero, this is among the best in the industry.

Genevieve, our new Linux web server is now online and ready for use! This server closely follows our standard configuration, except she has 1.5 TB drives. We are running final tests this weekend and will begin migrating some accounts over on Monday. Be aware that this server will only allow PHP 5. We should all be moving toward that anyway, so we saw no point in installing PHP 4 libraries on a new server.

You will be notified a few days in advance of any change to your account.  If your account is to be moved, we will be making sure that the configuration will transfer - PHP 4 is off, FrontPage Extensions are off, etc.  You should not see any downtime during an account move, but you will be asked not to update your account via FTP until the move is complete. 

As of this afternoon, we had been delisted by SpamCop, allowing our mail to go through the networks that were being blocked.  Hopefully this will end the problem.

Our mail server has been listed in the SpamCop database on and off for the past few days.  This is resulting in users being unable to send mail to some addresses.  We are aware of the problem and are working to correct it.  Unfortunately, SpamCop will not give us any usable information to track down the reason for the listing.  This is making it like looking for a needle in a haystack.

SpamCop does offer a tool that would allow us to be immediately delisted after the problem is corrected.  However, the tool is open for anyone to use, and apparently someone did.  Since the tool can only be used once, we now no longer have that option.  So when we do finally correct the problem, it could take up to 24 hours before we are officially delisted.

We will do our best to keep you informed of this situation.  We apologize for the inconvenience that this is causing.  We are working to correct this as quickly as we can.