E-Mail problem resolved.

The problem regarding duplication of e-mail has been resolved. Apologies to those affected.

Duplications of e-mail

From my server maintainer
10 am Friday 26th September


We are aware of an intermittent issue occurring on our mail server cluster, the symptoms of which are multiple copies of some emails are created in users' mailboxes. Our engineers have isolated the issue, the background to which is that on occasions our server message filters (for virus/spam scanning) create a looping process which results in scanning times for some emails being dramatically increased. As a guideline a typical message will be scanned by our spam and virus filters in fractions of seconds, in the issue condition messages can take 200+ seconds to scan, resulting in the remote SMTP server presuming the connection has been dropped and re-sending the message again. Because our cluster has not dropped the original connection (it is just taking a long time to scan it), both the original and any resent mail by the remote server are transferred to the users mailbox, resulting in the appearance of messages being duplicated. As mentioned, our engineers have now isolated this issue and we are giving full attention to putting a fix in place, which we hope to have applied across our mail platform within the next 48 hours. In the meantime we apologise for any inconvenience caused by this issue and ask you to bear with us until resolved.

A Good August

During August I am pleased to report website availability for my servers has again been 100%
Also all facilities are currently working.