The Protected Mail Quarantine System documentation is now online.  You can find it by going to http://www.protectedmail.net/ and clicking on the “PDF documentation” link at the bottom of the page.  Feel free to pass this documentation along to your users.

As some of you may have noticed, we did not implement the quarantine system switchover on Saturday.  My apologies for not getting this notice out to you sooner.

We’re going to push back the update to this Wednesday evening, 06/27/2007.  The main reason for this was to finish getting some of the documentation done to make sure you had it to give to your users.  We’ll have the documentation online later today, 06/25/2007, and will post an update here with the link.

On Saturday June 23, 2007 at approximately 8:00pm CDT, Easy Antispam will be activating our new Live Quarantine system.  This system enables users to login to the quarantine to view their spam in real time, get their quarantine via RSS feed and configure a daily quarantine digest email.

The default setting for the system will have the daily quarantine email disabled.  Your customers will no longer receive a daily quarantine email unless they activate their account at protecedmail.net and change their preferences to enable it.

Full documentation will be available shortly at http://www.protectedmail.net/.  This documentation will explain in detail how to activate an account at Protected Mail, the features which are available, and how to use the system.

We at Easy Antispam appreciate that you’ve chosen us to assist you in dealing with the ever-present problems of spam, viruses, and other malicious content.  This new quarantine system is one more step in helping your email users receive a complete antispam solution that is easy to set up, easy to use, and easy on the budget.

By popular request we have added an address filter to the new quarantine system so that when you’re viewing your quarantine you can easily select a particular email address and only view mail quarantined for that address.  This dropdown is located in the upper right corner of the page, right above the list of quarantined messages.

As we get ready to roll out the new quarantine system to everyone in the next few weeks, we’re looking for suggestions on what type of information we need to make available to our customers for their own understanding as well as information that they can pass on to their email users.  We’ll be developing some online help for the protectedmail.net site but also want to develop some information that we can send out to our customers so they understand the changes to the system.

If anyone using the new system has any suggestions on key points we need to make sure we pass along, please let us know.  You can post your comments to the post here or can email them to me directly at groberts@interjuncture.com.  Thanks!

Spam is now being quarantined once again and is no longer being tagged with [SPAM] in the subject line.  The RAID arrays have resynced successfully.

For those domains still on the old quarantine system we will be temporarily switching our spam engine to tagging spam instead of quarantining it, starting in the next few minutes. 

What does this mean?

Normally when our system detects spam it places into quarantine and each user receives a digest email that they can review.  When we switch the system to tagging mode each spam email will be delivered to the end user’s inbox with the tag [SPAM] in the subject line.

Why are you doing this?

Our gateways were inadvertantly power cycled this morning causing the RAID arrays on both MF1 and MF2 to become out of sync.  While we could continue with normal operations while the resync was occuring, we feel it prudent to make this temporary change because the additional load placed on the gateways by the resync process will sometimes cause the gateways to stop responding to incoming SMTP requests.  Once the resync process is complete we will change the system back to quarantining spam.

What are you doing to prevent this from happening again?

While we can’t guarantee that the RAID won’t go out of sync again (RAID arrays sometimes do for a variety of reasons), we have worked with our staff to ensure that this won’t happen again due to an inadvertant power cycle of the gateways.

We will update the blog when the resyncs have been completed and the gateways have been put back into quarantine mode.  Please contact us if you have any questions.