Sorry for the wrong subject in that last message. David
----- Original Message ----- From: "Daniel Armstrong" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2002 7:39 PM Subject: [IMail Forum] IMail restore question. > Hello All, > > The following epic tale is quite long-winded, and goes into more detail than > you might otherwise care to read... > > We are a small web design and hosting company. We outsource all of our > client's mail hosting to a large hosting company. Our future plans are to > host our client's mail on our own Imail servers (hence, the reason I > subscribe to the Imail list). > > Our wholesale hosting provider has used Imail exclusively for as long as I > can remember (more than three years). They have many Imail servers, and > about 300,000 end users (mail). We do not have our own dedicated server; our > clients are setup on a variety of different servers, both version 6 and 7. > Every hosted domain has its own IP, and each server hosts many domains. We > like Imail, and so do our clients. However, it's my opinion that we get > lousy service from our wholesale hosting provider, and this is the primary > reason why we plan to host our own Imail servers. However, in fairness, I'd > like to know just how 'lousy' the service really is. Maybe my expectations > are too high... > > With that said... would anyone be so generous as to offer an opinion on the > following: > > Our e-mail hosting provider recently had a 30 hour outage on one server that > knocked out POP and SMTP service for about 200 of our clients and ourselves. > We know of 10 other domains that are hosted on that machine. During the > outage all services on that one mail server were down; mail was bounced back > to sender. For the first 3-4 hours of the outage the server's NIC was live > (responded to PING). Then it vanished for the next 27 hours. The network > operations center was still operational. > > When service was restored, services came online in stages. POP and SMTP came > up first. However, individual POP accounts were not immediately restored. > The web interface came up second, but the index page defaulted to the host > name of the hosting company's mail server. Eventually the web mail interface > was restored with our virtual host name. Ultimately all POP accounts were > restored. We had no problems with logins or passwords, and all user custom > mail folders were restored. However, with one exception, none of the stored > mail that was previously on the server was restored. The exception appears > to be mail stored in 'sent' mail folders was restored. As you can well > imagine, our clients are understandably unhappy that the service was down > for such a long time, and woefully disappointed that their mailboxes were > empty when the service came back up. > > I forgot to mention, that during this entire ordeal (and in fact every > ordeal we suffer at the hands of this company...) we never spoke directly > with anyone in engineering, only and always to our Customer Relations > Manager who doesn't know anything technical about their systems. We have > never been given any explanation about why there was such a prolonged > outage, what was done to remedy the situation, and why the accounts could be > restored but the stored mail could not be restored. > > I guess my question is (thanks for reading thus far...) what's your opinion > on this kind of outage? Entirely unacceptable, or just one of the pitfalls > of doing business? I have never personally run an Imail server, but I do > host and admin several web servers. I would be very appreciative if anyone > could offer some explanation or insight into what kind of cataclysmic > meltdown could have occurred on this server, and why the mail was not able > to be restored. > > Any comments, opinions or insights regarding my saga would be greatly > appreciated. > > Yours truly, > Daniel > > > Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html > to be removed from this list. > > An Archive of this list is available at: > http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ > Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
