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/
