Many of you have noticed over the past week or so that we have been seeing a higher than normal amount of spam slip through the filters and make it to users’ inboxes.  We have been in contact with MailFoundry and they have told us that there was an issue with their system that takes messages from the reported spam feed and injects them into the rule creation engine, thus updating the spam definitions.  This has caused reported spam to not get put into the engine definitions in a timely manner, leading to an increase in non-filtered spam over the last week or so.

Reportedly this is looking better today, but the MailFoundry developers are monitoring the situation to see if any additional adjustment is necessary.  For those who have reported this increase in spam to our support department, please monitor the situation over the next few days and let us know if the amount of spam slipping through begins to reduce.

UPDATE: The issues with elevated levels of spam slipping through the filters appears to have been resolved.  Those of you who have reported this issue, please let us know by updating your support ticket or posting a comment on this post if the issue seems to be resolved for you.

We are currently performing emergency database maintenance on the G1 gateway to repair a corrupted user database.  We estimate a total time for repair of 30-60 minutes.  During a portion of this time SMTP services on G1 will be disabled.  Sending servers will queue the mail until services are restored and will deliver at that time.

MF2 is currently undergoing emergency user database maintenance to help improve performance on the gateway.  During this time mail services are stopped and mail will queue on sending servers, to be delivered normally within 4 hours based upon retry settings at the sender.

Emergency maintenance is expected to take approximately 30 minutes.

UPDATE: Maintenance complete @ 0243

Mail is temporarily being deferred on G1 (g1.ijnet.net) due to the user list index being corrupted.  We are currently rebuilding the index and expect service to be restored shortly.

Mail being temporarily deferred means that the gateway is responding to SMTP requests, but rather than accepting messages is responding with a 451 error to the sending server, asking the server to try again shortly.  Once the user list is rebuilt and mail is being accepted again, senders will be free to retry to deliver mail that was deferred.  No mail will be lost from this issue.

UPDATE: Service has been restored as of 8:30am central US time.

The staff here at Purity Networks has been working hard on some new features and functionality that we’ll be rolling out over the next few months. I wanted to take a few minutes and tell you about some of the things that are coming and approximate timeframes on when you’ll see them roll out:

New Integrated Live Quarantine

We will soon be integrating the Live Quarantine system into the Account Manager.  This will allow us to integrate the logins into one site, rather than having two separate sites as there are now.  One of the advantages of this is that the ability to theme the Account Manager is much more robust than the current Live Quarantine system.
Planned Release: February 2010

Additional Admin Accounts and Fine-grained Access Control

When the Live Quarantine is combined into the Account Manager, one of the major advantages is that we will also be rolling out the ability for our customers to give accounts access to administrative functions.  This access control will be very flexible and will allow the customer to give access to various areas of the Account Manager and even restrict access to specific domains.
Planned Release: February 2010

New Backend Technology

We will soon be replacing the backend scanning technology that we use with a completely new system.  The new technology we’ll be using is the same technology that will be going into our forthcoming antispam appliances.  Many of you know that we currently use technology from MailFoundry as our scanning engine.  We’ve used their products as the core of our service since we launched in 2005, and were extremely happy with their technology until recently.  Unfortunately, we feel that they have not been keeping up with changes necessary to effectively combat spam and other threats.

The core scanning technology we’ll be using in our new backend services and in our appliances is from Cloudmark, and we’ve been testing its effectiveness for several months now.   We’re happy to report we are extremely pleased with the performance and effectiveness and are beginning integration work now.
Planned Release: April 2010

We have some more things planned for this year as well, but I’ll leave those for a later message.  I think the things I posted above are enough to keep us busy for a little bit!

Please let us know if you have any questions or thoughts about our forthcoming changes.

Starting at approximately 8:30pm central time on Thursday, January 21, 2010, mail delivery on MF2 was impacted by an extremely large block of large virus-laden email, causing our antivirus processing to slow delivery of mail. This issue has been rectified and delayed mail is now being delivered at normal speeds. We expect that all delayed mail will be delivered within the next 30 minutes or so.