dublin.ie blog

We’ve been dealing with an issue for the guts of a week now and we’re finally in a position to brief you on it. As you know, we offer free dublin.ie addresses to people who register for them on the site. As you can imagine, we get a lot of spammers looking to create accounts and so we de-activate registrations from outside Ireland and the UK. If we believe the user to be genuine, we then go about re-activating the account in question. However we experienced a high level of registrations in the past week which were bypassing our de-activation process and sending spam email out. This in turn led to our servers being listed on anti-spam lists temporarily which held up delivery of outbound email to some services.

Our hosting and software providers have investigated the problem and issued us a patch to install. We plan on doing that today (22/02/12) at 16:00. We anticipate the change to take no longer than a couple of minutes. We’d like to stress that this is not a security related issue in any way. Your data is safe and secure. This is purely closing a loophole so that spammers can’t register accounts in future. Thanks for your understanding.

UPDATE 23/02/12 @ 14:45: Our mail servers have been removed from all remote black lists (which cause delays or stop mails from being delivered) bar two. We can’t force a removal from those two but expect them to de-list us within 48 hours and it doesn’t seem to be affecting a lot of outbound mail. We’re continuing to monitor the issue until it’s fully resolved.

We’ve noted users reports of problems connecting to dublin.ie email since our update on the 18th. We’ve been working with the software vendors and our network administrators to get to the bottom of the issue and it appears as if we have this afternoon.

Shortly before 3.30pm we disabled webmail to make the changes and webmail was operational again at 3.50pm. Inbound email was queued whilst we worked on the system. Due to the seriousness of the issue, we decided to enact the fix as soon as we had it so we were unable to warn of the outage. If you experience any further problems related to ‘connection closed’ or the system operating slowly, please open a helpdesk ticket.

We’re applying a patch to the email system on Wednesday morning 18th January at 07:30. As you may know, we were unable to run this update in December due to remote server issues but we’re confident we’ve fully resolved those and are proceeding. Users can expect to see a faster interface and a ton of smaller improvements. We expect minimal downtime and we will be taking the usual steps in terms of mail delivery and backup. We apologise in advance for any inconvenience.

UPDATE 18/01 @ 16:41: We were unable to run the update this morning but have re-scheduled for the same time window tomorrow. There was no interruption in service this morning.

UPDATE 19/01 @ 11:24: We’re happy to report that everything went smoothly this morning and we were back online at 08:44. The patch has made a lot of changes in the background but one notable inclusion is drag and drop to folders in both mail and contacts for Internet Explorer 9 users.

We’re applying a patch to the email system on Thursday morning (tomorrow) 8th December at 07:30. This update will make the calendar functions faster and it will allow you to setup an iOS device (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) easier. There are numerous other “under the hood” fixes that will applied too. We expect minimal downtime and we will be taking the usual steps in terms of mail delivery and backup. We apologise in advance for any inconvenience and will update this blog post when we’re done.

UPDATE: We were unable to complete the update this morning as remote software license servers were unavailable to us at short notice. We realised this quickly and rolled all backups into place. As this was out of our control, we’ll need to re-schedule and a notice will go up on the site in due course.