July 2007

As we prepare for the massive upgrades coming this weekend we are obviously testing systems and making intermediate changes to the network. As a result, over the next 48 hours you are likely to see some latency in DNS query results which virtually impact all other services such as backups, ExchangeDefender, virtual servers and everything else thats being brought online.

While you are unlikely to notice any of these changes directly, if you do see slight performance issues they are probably related to the maintenance work being done on our end.

We are extending the maintenance cycle window for July 21, 2007. Our regular maintenance cycle is from 3AM to 7AM EST but due to the number of systems going online this week we are going to have to extend that window until noon EST. We will follow up with full details of the work being done but suffice to say it is significant.

If you are not familiar with our maintenance cycle activities do not worry, they are routine and they happen every week. Generally they are things you would expect – reboots to add more memory, storage, reboot for software patch installation, etc. At times there are other items such as electrical or network maintenance.

This particular weekend involves nearly all of the above plus a significant upgrade to our core infrastructure of ExchangeDefender, offsite backups and virtual servers. We’re bringing online 3 new data centers to top it off so we wanted to give ourselves more time to get everything done right.

Dear Partners,

I (Vlad Mazek, CEO) am at the Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference this week.

I have intentionally kept Thursday completely open on my schedule and have absolutely no appointments after breakfast – so if you are interested in speaking to me just track me down and lets get together whenever you have room between meetings. I have done this last year and found it very valuable to catch up with those of you that are very busy and just can’t find time in connect to arrange for an official gettogether, or meetings get cancelled, moved, etc. So send me an email and lets meet up whenever there is time.

We recently started receiving complaints about certain users not having their SPAM and SURESPAM filtering policies applied correctly. For example, user would select to quarantine their SPAM and delete their SURESPAM but mail would still arrive in the inbox with the subject modified as [SPAM] or [SURESPAM].

As of 10 AM EST this bug has been fixed. If you have your mail set to quarantine on either of the SPAM presets the rules will be applied correctly. If that does not happen consistently and correctly please open up a support ticket at https://support.ownwebnow.com

Note: The issue was related to the legacy network policy server not syncronizing filtering rule tables in correct order. It would treat its local database as the most up-to-date one and would never apply the newer policies. This issue has been fixed.