Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Dear all,
From 17 July, vgsmail will be run by QX Telecom Ltd (http://www.qxtelecom.co.uk/). Below you will find a short message from Steven Pang.
In the short term this will probably make very little difference to users. All email addresses, URLs and account userids / passwords will remain unchanged. There might be a few short periods of downtime at some point after the 17th when we transfer the system to a new machine, but hopefully these will be minimised.
As promised, you now have an opportunity to have all your account details removed from the vgsmail system before the transfer goes ahead. If you wish to have the details removed (your account will be deleted, all contact details removed, all message history deleted and any remaining credit will be forfeited) please email deleteme@vgsmail.com (remember to include your vgsmail userid and mobile number) within the next 7 days.
I'm very pleased with the way this transfer has worked out as I am happy to see vgsmail live on and I'm confident that Steven will continue to provide all vgsmail users with an excellent service.
Now all that remains is for me to thank you all for supporting and using vgsmail over the last 3 years. It's been great fun and an exciting experience for me. And obviously the best thing you can do to keep vgsmail going is to continue using it and to tell all your friends to use vgsmail for their SMS needs.
Over and out.
Geoff.
--
Dear VGSMail users,
As you all know that Geoff setup the VGSMail service a few years back and hence since provided a very useful and good value service.
We at QX Telecom Ltd hate to see VGSMail close and have decided to take over the service and shall strive to keep Geoff's original vision alive of providing a useful and good value service.
Just a little introduction here - QX Telecom Ltd was setup a few years back in order to provide value and innovative telephone services. We have good reputation in providing excellent customer serivce as well as being creative and responsive to our customers' requiremenst and as QX VGSmail customer, you can expect the same.
Thank you
Steven Pang
Director
From 17 July, vgsmail will be run by QX Telecom Ltd (http://www.qxtelecom.co.uk/). Below you will find a short message from Steven Pang.
In the short term this will probably make very little difference to users. All email addresses, URLs and account userids / passwords will remain unchanged. There might be a few short periods of downtime at some point after the 17th when we transfer the system to a new machine, but hopefully these will be minimised.
As promised, you now have an opportunity to have all your account details removed from the vgsmail system before the transfer goes ahead. If you wish to have the details removed (your account will be deleted, all contact details removed, all message history deleted and any remaining credit will be forfeited) please email deleteme@vgsmail.com (remember to include your vgsmail userid and mobile number) within the next 7 days.
I'm very pleased with the way this transfer has worked out as I am happy to see vgsmail live on and I'm confident that Steven will continue to provide all vgsmail users with an excellent service.
Now all that remains is for me to thank you all for supporting and using vgsmail over the last 3 years. It's been great fun and an exciting experience for me. And obviously the best thing you can do to keep vgsmail going is to continue using it and to tell all your friends to use vgsmail for their SMS needs.
Over and out.
Geoff.
--
Dear VGSMail users,
As you all know that Geoff setup the VGSMail service a few years back and hence since provided a very useful and good value service.
We at QX Telecom Ltd hate to see VGSMail close and have decided to take over the service and shall strive to keep Geoff's original vision alive of providing a useful and good value service.
Just a little introduction here - QX Telecom Ltd was setup a few years back in order to provide value and innovative telephone services. We have good reputation in providing excellent customer serivce as well as being creative and responsive to our customers' requiremenst and as QX VGSmail customer, you can expect the same.
Thank you
Steven Pang
Director
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Dear all,
It is now 8 months since I announced the closure of vgsmail and as
promised vgsmail has been running relatively unchanged since then. I
was orginally hoping to find someone to take over the service, but
unfortunately this hasn't happened yet for a number of reasons.
The schedule for closure is as follows:
Immediately - No new accounts will be allowed.
Immediately - No further credits will be accepted to existing accounts.
1 July 2006 - Service closure.
Geoff.
It is now 8 months since I announced the closure of vgsmail and as
promised vgsmail has been running relatively unchanged since then. I
was orginally hoping to find someone to take over the service, but
unfortunately this hasn't happened yet for a number of reasons.
The schedule for closure is as follows:
Immediately - No new accounts will be allowed.
Immediately - No further credits will be accepted to existing accounts.
1 July 2006 - Service closure.
Geoff.
Saturday, October 15, 2005
Once again the forum (http://forum.vgsmail.com) has been hacked. It will be offline indefinitely until I decide whether it is worth putting it back online.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Unfortunately a scheduling problem meant that the move of forum.vgsmail.com which was meant to happen yesterday didn't go ahead. Therefore the forum didn't go offline and has not been relocated. However, it looks the move will now happen at the latest next Monday (3rd October), but will be be offline from sometime on Wednesday (28th September).
Thursday, September 22, 2005
The forum (http://forum.vgsmail.com) will be offline from Monday 26th until some point on Wednesday 28th as it is being moved between two sites.
Geoff.
Geoff.
Thursday, September 01, 2005
Dear all,
Apologies for the second email in two days, I promise this will be the last one for a while. In future, I will post all updates to the following blog:
http://www.vgsmail.com/blog/
A number of questions have arisen regarding the closure of vgsmail and I thought I would answer them in one go:
1) First, as I said in my previous email, I will keep vgsmail running
for the foreseeable future. This applies particularly to large
users as they might have relatively significant credit on their
accounts which needs to be used up. I will also ensure that you
all have plenty of time to move your code over to whatever system
comes next. By 'foreseeable future', I am talking 3-6 months
timeframe. The only immediate change will be that I have stopped
taking on new users; I am going to restart accepting payments again
with the proviso that you bear this timescale in mind.
2) I have now been approached by a number of people, private and
commercial, who wish to 'take over' vgsmail. For this reason, if
you can possibly bear it, please hold fast. It is looking like
vgsmail might well continue to live on in some shape or form. I
just need to ensure that the shape and form is consistent with the
current shape and form of vgsmail.
3) If you have contacted me regarding 2), I'll get back to you ASAP.
If you do have a proposal, please contact me within the next day or
two.
Now, I shall try to get back to reading my emails. Thanks for all the nice messages!
Geoff.
Apologies for the second email in two days, I promise this will be the last one for a while. In future, I will post all updates to the following blog:
http://www.vgsmail.com/blog/
A number of questions have arisen regarding the closure of vgsmail and I thought I would answer them in one go:
1) First, as I said in my previous email, I will keep vgsmail running
for the foreseeable future. This applies particularly to large
users as they might have relatively significant credit on their
accounts which needs to be used up. I will also ensure that you
all have plenty of time to move your code over to whatever system
comes next. By 'foreseeable future', I am talking 3-6 months
timeframe. The only immediate change will be that I have stopped
taking on new users; I am going to restart accepting payments again
with the proviso that you bear this timescale in mind.
2) I have now been approached by a number of people, private and
commercial, who wish to 'take over' vgsmail. For this reason, if
you can possibly bear it, please hold fast. It is looking like
vgsmail might well continue to live on in some shape or form. I
just need to ensure that the shape and form is consistent with the
current shape and form of vgsmail.
3) If you have contacted me regarding 2), I'll get back to you ASAP.
If you do have a proposal, please contact me within the next day or
two.
Now, I shall try to get back to reading my emails. Thanks for all the nice messages!
Geoff.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Dear vgsmail user,
It is with enormous regret that I am announcing the eventual closureof vgsmail after just over two full years. The reasons for this arenumerous, but primarily due it is just taking too much of my time.
Before you start panicking:
- your account on vgsmail will remain active for the foreseeable future and so you will have plenty of time to use up any remaining credit. However, please bear in mind that eventually all accounts will be closed (if you have significant credit remaining on your account, I might be able to arrange a refund; otherwise all donations towards the last 2 years of service are welcome :).
- you will not be able to add any further credit to your account effective immediately.
- there are alternatives to vgsmail. I won't recommend any specific sites, but typing 'bulk SMS' or 'cheap SMS' into google will get you to them.
I must admit that I am slightly sad that vgsmail is now eventuallyending but also happy with the outcome of 2 years work. Thanks forall the support!
Geoff.
It is with enormous regret that I am announcing the eventual closureof vgsmail after just over two full years. The reasons for this arenumerous, but primarily due it is just taking too much of my time.
Before you start panicking:
- your account on vgsmail will remain active for the foreseeable future and so you will have plenty of time to use up any remaining credit. However, please bear in mind that eventually all accounts will be closed (if you have significant credit remaining on your account, I might be able to arrange a refund; otherwise all donations towards the last 2 years of service are welcome :).
- you will not be able to add any further credit to your account effective immediately.
- there are alternatives to vgsmail. I won't recommend any specific sites, but typing 'bulk SMS' or 'cheap SMS' into google will get you to them.
I must admit that I am slightly sad that vgsmail is now eventuallyending but also happy with the outcome of 2 years work. Thanks forall the support!
Geoff.
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
The forum is now back on-line.
Monday, February 07, 2005
The forum machine (forum.vgsmail.com) has been hacked and due to a hole in the php code (not mine...:) running on that machine the hackers managed to get some limited access to the machine. There appears to be a number of trojans installed on the machine and therefore I am now setting about completely rebuilding the machine. No data has (so far) been lost, but it might be down for the rest of the week in order for me to do a thorough job.
I'm afraid I've had to increase prices to 4p per message as from today. Unfortunately the cost of reliably routing messages has increased a bit recently and in order to make ends meet I have had to reflect these increases...
Saturday, August 07, 2004
Thursday, August 05, 2004
Special: For the next 24-48 hours, I am testing out a new route. Messages will therefore only cost 1 pence per SMS!
I can't guarantee when the prices will be changed back, so check back here regularly. At the end of this trial, I'll have to put the cost back to what it currently is (3.8p to most destinations).
I can't guarantee when the prices will be changed back, so check back here regularly. At the end of this trial, I'll have to put the cost back to what it currently is (3.8p to most destinations).
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
Update: Everything should now be working correctly. The problems seem to have been very much less severe than I thought; after a complete rebuild of the file system (for those interested: ReiserFS is wonderful!) everything seems to be back online and working. If you're getting this page instead of the normal vgsmail home-page your DNS cache is out-of-date: you can probably get there by going to http://sms.vgsmail.com for the next day or so (don't bookmark that address is it's not guarenteed to stay around in the long term).
As I said yesterday, I'm working on making some big back-room changes which would involve moving the whole of vgsmail to a much more reliable and robust site. If things go to plan, this will have no effect on any other part of the system (including the price of messaging).
Again, sorry for the downtime...
As I said yesterday, I'm working on making some big back-room changes which would involve moving the whole of vgsmail to a much more reliable and robust site. If things go to plan, this will have no effect on any other part of the system (including the price of messaging).
Again, sorry for the downtime...
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Update: I have isolated the problem to the hard-drive. I don't think the drive has actually crashed, but it is certainly behaving very strangely. I believe this is related to the storm we had earlier, even though the machine is isolated. Unfortunately I do not have a RAID drive.
I am going to try the following, in order, however there is relatively little I can do today:
- attempt to reconstruct the current drive;
- attempt to boot the machine from an alternative backup drive I have;
- rebuild a new drive.
My current estimate is that this will take a maximum of 3 days.
So:
First, my most sincere apologies. This is the first down-time we have had since February, and I must admit to having become slightly complacent. I should have had a backup drive on-hand ready to swap in. A side-effect of my not-for-profit status is that I can't afford much spare hardware, and so this is slightly inevitable from time-to-time.
Second, I had some relatively big behind-the-scenes changes under-way which I will annouce later. However, this should hopefully stop this happening again.
Third, as a very small consolation, I'm going to credit you with 10 free messages as soon as the machine is back up and running. To qualify, please send an email to temp030704@vgsmail.com with your userid as subject (the rest of the email can be empty). Only emails received before the system is back up-and-running will be accepted.
I am going to try the following, in order, however there is relatively little I can do today:
- attempt to reconstruct the current drive;
- attempt to boot the machine from an alternative backup drive I have;
- rebuild a new drive.
My current estimate is that this will take a maximum of 3 days.
So:
First, my most sincere apologies. This is the first down-time we have had since February, and I must admit to having become slightly complacent. I should have had a backup drive on-hand ready to swap in. A side-effect of my not-for-profit status is that I can't afford much spare hardware, and so this is slightly inevitable from time-to-time.
Second, I had some relatively big behind-the-scenes changes under-way which I will annouce later. However, this should hopefully stop this happening again.
Third, as a very small consolation, I'm going to credit you with 10 free messages as soon as the machine is back up and running. To qualify, please send an email to temp030704@vgsmail.com with your userid as subject (the rest of the email can be empty). Only emails received before the system is back up-and-running will be accepted.
Update: At present I am unable to reboot the machine correctly. I believe the problem is related to the thunderstorm we had earlier. I will keep you updated.
Outage: The machine running vgsmail appears to have crashed rather badly. I am currently off-site and can therefore not access the machine for the next few hours. Until I have tried to reboot it, I can't ascertain exactly what has gone wrong and how long it will take to fix it (it might be that a reboot is all it needs).
My apologies for the down-time. I'll keep you up-to-date via this page as I find out more.
My apologies for the down-time. I'll keep you up-to-date via this page as I find out more.
Saturday, July 24, 2004
I have recently changed my routing tables very slightly and am now able to reduce the cost of messages very slightly. Go here for the new rates.
Friday, July 16, 2004
I'm afraid my sources of very cheap messages are running a bit dry at the moment. There seems to be an attempt by network operators to push up the price of messaging to discourage bulk operators. I've got a couple of possible routes which I am investigating, but until than I'm afraid the cost of messages is going to have to go up.
With the exception of Austria and Germany (which both remain fixed at 6.0 pence per message), the cost of messages will now be set at 4.0 pence for all destinations.
With the exception of Austria and Germany (which both remain fixed at 6.0 pence per message), the cost of messages will now be set at 4.0 pence for all destinations.
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Effective immediately, any messages sent by users which have not bought credit (i.e. users relying on the free sign-up credit) will be appended with a little message. The free credit was intended as a means of testing the service, however a lot of users have been using it as a way of getting free SMS. I'm afraid this only has the effect of pushing up the price of messages for others... This will not affect the legitimate users of vgsmail.
Sunday, June 20, 2004
Developments "hot of the press regarding" the MSN Messenger gateway can be followed here.
Saturday, June 19, 2004
I am currently experimenting with a very very new feature which I thought might be useful. It is still very much under-development, but if anyone is interested please let me know.
If you use MSN Messenger, add 'msn@vgsmail.com' to your buddy list. Then PM me with your MSN userid and your vgsmail userid, and I'll get you setup. Once I've done that, to send an SMS just send a message from the Messenger client to the vgsmail 'buddy' in the following format:
sms 07971123456 This is my message
or
sms myalias This is my message
Currently you will receive no response, but the message 'should' be queued. The message will also be cropped to the first 160 characters.
New features coming soon:
- Delivery reports via MSN
- Long messages
or
sms myalias This is my message
Currently you will receive no response, but the message 'should' be queued. The message will also be cropped to the first 160 characters.
New features coming soon:
- Delivery reports via MSN
- Long messages"
If you use MSN Messenger, add 'msn@vgsmail.com' to your buddy list. Then PM me with your MSN userid and your vgsmail userid, and I'll get you setup. Once I've done that, to send an SMS just send a message from the Messenger client to the vgsmail 'buddy' in the following format:
sms 07971123456 This is my message
or
sms myalias This is my message
Currently you will receive no response, but the message 'should' be queued. The message will also be cropped to the first 160 characters.
New features coming soon:
- Delivery reports via MSN
- Long messages
or
sms myalias This is my message
Currently you will receive no response, but the message 'should' be queued. The message will also be cropped to the first 160 characters.
New features coming soon:
- Delivery reports via MSN
- Long messages"
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
On of my most reliable routes to the UK went down yesterday and seems to be slightly unreliable today. Quite a few messages from about 19.00 last night until about midnight were not delivered. Things seem to be looking better now.
Friday, May 28, 2004
The following email was sent to all users today. Archived here for future users:
Dear all,
As you'll probably be aware, vgsmail has now been running for just over a year, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to send out a quick email.
I would like to apologize to those that don't read the 'News and Updates' page (I strongly recommend that you DO) and have submitted support requests over the last few weeks. Things non-vgsmail have been rather busy recently and I've fallen dramatically behind in providing personal responses to your questions. In most cases the problems have been solved, but I just didn't get round to sending a reply. I'm going to try to go through my inbox over the next week and see what I can do.
As a way of reducing my workload, and hopefully providing you with better support, I have just installed a 'forum' at http://www.vgsmail.com/forum. This will now be the primary support mechanism for vgsmail. So please use the forum in you future requests / questions / comments, and I'll reply directly on the forum.
Hopefully repeated questions will then be avoided and give me more time to make all the changes and improvements I've been promising for the last year...
On more general topics:
- Messages are still charged at 3.8p per message to all UK
destinations. I've been getting pretty good reliability through my
preferred UK route over the last month and hopefully this will hold
up.
- I now support a rather rudimentary form of binary SMS. I'll post
details of the API on the forum if anyone is interested.
- As I commented on the News page, GenieTexter
(http://www.genietexter.co.uk/) supports vgsmail and it's a pretty
nice way of sending quick messages from your desktop.
- As usual: please introduce your friends / enemies / ... to vgsmail.
Obviously the more messages I route, the cheaper I can buy them and
the cheaper they are for you (I promise to pass on any future
savings directly).
Finally: if you're reading this email, it's because you have the 'Receive updates by email' option selected on your account. If you do you wish to receive similar emails in the future (although this is only the second message I have sent in a year), login to the web-interface, select 'Account setup' and un-select this option.
Geoff.
support@vgsmail.com
Dear all,
As you'll probably be aware, vgsmail has now been running for just over a year, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to send out a quick email.
I would like to apologize to those that don't read the 'News and Updates' page (I strongly recommend that you DO) and have submitted support requests over the last few weeks. Things non-vgsmail have been rather busy recently and I've fallen dramatically behind in providing personal responses to your questions. In most cases the problems have been solved, but I just didn't get round to sending a reply. I'm going to try to go through my inbox over the next week and see what I can do.
As a way of reducing my workload, and hopefully providing you with better support, I have just installed a 'forum' at http://www.vgsmail.com/forum. This will now be the primary support mechanism for vgsmail. So please use the forum in you future requests / questions / comments, and I'll reply directly on the forum.
Hopefully repeated questions will then be avoided and give me more time to make all the changes and improvements I've been promising for the last year...
On more general topics:
- Messages are still charged at 3.8p per message to all UK
destinations. I've been getting pretty good reliability through my
preferred UK route over the last month and hopefully this will hold
up.
- I now support a rather rudimentary form of binary SMS. I'll post
details of the API on the forum if anyone is interested.
- As I commented on the News page, GenieTexter
(http://www.genietexter.co.uk/) supports vgsmail and it's a pretty
nice way of sending quick messages from your desktop.
- As usual: please introduce your friends / enemies / ... to vgsmail.
Obviously the more messages I route, the cheaper I can buy them and
the cheaper they are for you (I promise to pass on any future
savings directly).
Finally: if you're reading this email, it's because you have the 'Receive updates by email' option selected on your account. If you do you wish to receive similar emails in the future (although this is only the second message I have sent in a year), login to the web-interface, select 'Account setup' and un-select this option.
Geoff.
support@vgsmail.com
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
I would like to apologize to those who have emailed me over the last few weeks and have not received a response. I'm afraid I've developed a rather absurd backlog which could take a couple of weeks to clear. I do generally try to sort out any specific problems as soon as I get your emails, but responding personally takes a bit longer.
Saturday, May 15, 2004
After much prompting from various users, the delivery report emails should now translate the destination number into an 'alias' if one exists. A trivial change, but something I've been asked for again and again.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Binary SMS is now available, allowing the sending of MMS, ring-tones, pictures ... etc. It is currently only available via an http-to-SMS API. The cost per message is the same as text-only SMS. If you want details, please email support@vgsmail.com.
Monday, May 10, 2004
Someone at GenieTexter seems to have implemented a vgsmail filter which seems to work just fine. This is a nice way of sending messages if sending them from the web is too slow for you.
Monday, April 05, 2004
Bug fix: A relatively serious bug (when pushing a long message through to multiple SMS messages, they get split up into 160 character chunks, although the second and all subsequent chunks were identical!) in the email-to-SMS interface was pointed out to me last week. It has now been fixed.
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
At some point yesterday evening the email-to-SMS service stopped functioning and I was only made aware of the problem this morning. After much searching the problem was found to be rather obscure, but is now fixed. The problem was due to a log file going over a limit of 51M which seemingly causes procmail to stop working with no trace of a reason. As soon as the log file was removed, things started working again.
Friday, March 12, 2004
I have become slightly disillusioned with my current cheapest UK route, as failures seem to be rather too common. Therefore I am going to phase this route out and use alternative routes. Unfortunately this means that the cost of messages will shortly return to the rate of 3.8p/message until I can find an alternative reliable route for UK-bound messages.
As you may have noticed, this page has been offline for the last couple of weeks. I was hosting it with a host which seemed cheap; the downside was that they lost all their server with hardware failure recently and do not appear to have made provision for such an eventuality. I have cancelled my account with them and moved this page elsewhere. If you had a bookmark saved, please change it to
http://vgsnet.infinology.net/vgsmail/
http://vgsnet.infinology.net/vgsmail/
Thursday, February 26, 2004
Full service is has now been resumed. Basically it seems like there was a short powercut which resulted in the server rebooting. I have no idea why the server did not reboot in a correct state, but it has now been rebooted again and is working fine. I will look into the problem to see if I can work out what happened.
It might take a short while for the temporary DNS entry to be flushed from servers around the world, and so if http://www.vgsmail.com gets you to this page, please go to http://81.168.115.200 instead for the next few hours.
It might take a short while for the temporary DNS entry to be flushed from servers around the world, and so if http://www.vgsmail.com gets you to this page, please go to http://81.168.115.200 instead for the next few hours.
Just to fill you in on what's going on:
I am currently off-site and will not be able to access the machine directly until this evening. At present, I am not able to get into the network for some reason, and there is not a lot I can do. One of my status-checking algorithms sends out pings from my machine at regular intervals, and that does appear to be working fine which tells me that the network connection is up and the server is running. This suggests that one of my routers/firewalls has failed on me again and is rejecting inbound packets. I've asked my ISP to check if the problem is at their end, but sadly I don't think it is.
So there is a possibility that the router will self-reboot, but I doubt it. And until I get access to the machine this evening, I'm afraid there is nothing I can do from here. Sorry (and if it's any consolation, I'm sure that I am as disappointed as you are)!
I am currently off-site and will not be able to access the machine directly until this evening. At present, I am not able to get into the network for some reason, and there is not a lot I can do. One of my status-checking algorithms sends out pings from my machine at regular intervals, and that does appear to be working fine which tells me that the network connection is up and the server is running. This suggests that one of my routers/firewalls has failed on me again and is rejecting inbound packets. I've asked my ISP to check if the problem is at their end, but sadly I don't think it is.
So there is a possibility that the router will self-reboot, but I doubt it. And until I get access to the machine this evening, I'm afraid there is nothing I can do from here. Sorry (and if it's any consolation, I'm sure that I am as disappointed as you are)!
I am having some connection difficulties from my current off-site location, and I am not sure what the exact issue is at the moment. I will hopefully sort this out shortly.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
vgsmail will be running unattended from Saturday evening until 9th March. If something does go very wrong steps will be taken to fix it, although I am pretty confident that things will run smoothly. Credit requests and other admin questions will be dealt with, but might be delayed slightly (if you are in urgent need of an account top-up, please try to do it before Saturday).
Saturday, February 14, 2004
The server is now back up. There will be another very brief outage in about 15 minutes, but no more than a couple of minutes.
I'm afraid I have to make a very quick reboot of the server to move it. The server will be down for about 2 minutes.
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
The update has just about finished, after a number of false starts. Everything should now be stable again (although I don't think there have been any problems today).
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
The server is due for its monthly software and kernel upgrade tomorrow. The upgrade will take a large part of the day, which might make the system slightly less responsive, but shouldn't otherwise effect the service. There might also be a couple of very brief reboots which shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes.
I am getting a bit frustrated with the new cheaper route I have been using recently, and am considering going back to the old primary routing I had previously been using as it was more reliable. Sadly this would put the cost of messages back up to 3.8p per message.
Friday, February 06, 2004
Some very minor problems with my router for about 15 minutes this morning. I'm not even sure the problems actually affected anyone.
Thursday, February 05, 2004
I have now finished porting the old updates and news items to this page. Some of the links might have got lost on the way, but they are only there for historic purposes :)
This is the first post on this blogger site: from now on, all posts will be made here. If you have linked to this page from elsewhere, please change your links appropriately. This page is hosted on a remote site and will therefore be 'up' irrespective of the status of the main site. If you cannot get a response from http://www.vgsmail.com, then please look here to find out what is going on: if there is no message here, you should try emailing support@vgsmail.com.
I am going to slowly port the older posts to this site: in the meantime, please go to
http://www.vgsmail.com/old_news.html
to read them.
I am going to slowly port the older posts to this site: in the meantime, please go to
http://www.vgsmail.com/old_news.html
to read them.
Friday, January 30, 2004
- Outage report: As some of you may have noticed, until yesterday vgsmail ran on a dynamically allocated IP address, with the mapping being maintained by zoneedit. I liked this setup as it gave a very minor added protection against network scanners looking for linux systems to hack. However, it did have a couple of minor drawbacks (some web-caches didn't like this) and I finally made the decision yesterday to move to a static IP address. I requested that the change be made at noon, and at about 2pm my connection disappeared completely. After much confusion and about 2 hours on the phone this morning the problem seems to have been fixed (a combination of a fault with the ISP end and a dodgy router at my end). My apologies again for the outage.
- A positive side-effect to the previous paragraph is that I have now opening up the new UK-directed route and am reducing the cost of all UK-bound messages to 3.4p, effective immediately.
- A positive side-effect to the previous paragraph is that I have now opening up the new UK-directed route and am reducing the cost of all UK-bound messages to 3.4p, effective immediately.
Sunday, January 11, 2004
The routing change announced on the 7th is not going to happen today as it is proving to be much less reliable than expected. Therefore the rates will remain unchanged for another few days while I speak with the service provider about the problems I have encountered.
Wednesday, January 07, 2004
Change of rates for all destinations: As from Sunday 11 January the rates for all destinations will be reduced to 3.4p per message. After a bit of fiddling, we have managed to work out a pretty reliable and slightly cheaper route. Hopefully reliability will hold up, but if not we will have to return to our previous route and hence the slightly higher costs.
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
- Happy New Year!
- We have recently added a 5th service provider to our list which appears initially to be as good as the other providers we use, but significantly cheaper. I am going to test it for the next couple of weeks and if it proves reliable it will be added to our default routes which could potentially result in a decrease in message costs being annouced shortly.
- We have recently added a 5th service provider to our list which appears initially to be as good as the other providers we use, but significantly cheaper. I am going to test it for the next couple of weeks and if it proves reliable it will be added to our default routes which could potentially result in a decrease in message costs being annouced shortly.
Wednesday, December 24, 2003
Christmas period support: vgsmail support will be unavailable on the 25th December and then again from 31st December to 5th January. During those times, credits might take longer to be applied to your accounts and faults might take a bit longer to fix. Having said that, I am very confident that we will have an incident-free period as the new server has been very reliable and robust over the last couple of weeks. Happy Christmas everyone!
Saturday, December 13, 2003
It appears that computers are designed with a continuous usage limit of about 18 months: as fast as we patched the old server, new problems surfaced. This precipitated an emergency move to the new server this afternoon and as of 19.00 today the new server is serving all vgsmail services. It seems to be stable now, but there might be a few things here and there which have not been setup correctly: if you encounter any problems, please email support@vgsmail.com and I will try to fix things as soon as possible. The new server should be faster than the old system and we have removed a number of dependencies in the system in order to provide a more reliable service. Sadly one of the consequences of vgsmail running on a non-profit basis is that we do not have indefinite and full-time support and we cannot maintain a fully redundant service. Having said that, I agree that the service over the last week has not been of acceptable quality and our first priority at the moment is to return to the reliable service we have provided over the last 6 months: I very much hope that you will bear with us over the next couple of days in case there are any further problems.
Friday, December 12, 2003
Not a good week: yesterday the whole of vgsmail was down for about 24 hours. Things are now back to normal, although it is not entirely clear as to what the problem was. I think it might have had something to do with one of the settings on our router, but this doesn't fully explain what caused the router to suddenly stop routing packets.
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
The billing database went wrong earlier this morning and as a result a very small number of messages were rejected with the message "Credit Failure". The problem has been corrected and the messages have now been delivered for free (if you are one of the effected users you will have received a refund notice). My apologies for this problem.
Monday, December 08, 2003
Outage: At some point yesterday one of our hardware routers failed. Unfortunately it took a while to reconfigure a new router (which we had ready as backup). The system is now back up and running. I am not exactly sure what caused the failure of the previous router, but it might have had something to do with a firmware upgrade on the main router; it is strange that it took 3 days for this problem to become apparent. It might take a while for the new IP address to filter through the DNS servers.
Friday, November 28, 2003
Outage: There was a brief (about 30 minutes) unplanned outage this afternoon due to the server hardware changes which are underway. Apologies... The actual problem is rather complex and involves linux distributions and hardware changes. Everything should now be back running as usual.
Monday, November 24, 2003
- The server hardware is to be upgraded this weekend. This should have no impact on service as the swap will only be made once the new system is up and stable. It might result in very slightly increased response times, but as the current hardware is very rarely fully loaded I don't think the speed increase will be noticeable.
- As a completely seperate project, I recently implemented an SMS-to-IM interface. This allowed me to hold a MSN Messenger conversation with someone (albeit slightly slowly) via SMS when I was away from my computer. To my contacts, I therefore appear to be always 'online'. I am considering integrating this into vgsmail, but it would require a bit of effort and I will only implement it should the demand be high enough. If you would be interested (with absolutely no commitment) in using this type of enhancement, please send a blank email to IMYes@vgsmail.com; other comments as usual to suggestions@vgsmail.com.
- As a completely seperate project, I recently implemented an SMS-to-IM interface. This allowed me to hold a MSN Messenger conversation with someone (albeit slightly slowly) via SMS when I was away from my computer. To my contacts, I therefore appear to be always 'online'. I am considering integrating this into vgsmail, but it would require a bit of effort and I will only implement it should the demand be high enough. If you would be interested (with absolutely no commitment) in using this type of enhancement, please send a blank email to IMYes@vgsmail.com; other comments as usual to suggestions@vgsmail.com.
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
I have had a couple of issues with numbers ported from Orange UK to one of the other UK networks. There is now a route which appears to work for such numbers, but as I have no way of detecting them automatically I have to set the routing tables manually. If you wish to message someone on a ported number, please email support@vgsmail.com and I will set up the routing table appropriately.
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
Between 18.05 and 18.33, Zoneedit (which hosts my DNS entries) seems to have done something slightly strange and started to report an incorrect IP address for the host www.vgsmail.com. I'm not exactly sure how this happened as I do not believe that anything went wrong at our end. The result for those affected was a '403 Connection refused' message when attempting to access the web-page. For most people it appears that their local DNS was correcting caching the address and they will therefore have not noticed any problems. For some, it might take a short while for the correct address to filter through.
Sunday, September 28, 2003
The new payment scheme as outlined on 17 September is now in force. Please note that charges may change as the bulk SMS market fluctuates: for warnings of changes, please check this page frequently and the current charges will be reflected here.
Friday, September 26, 2003
It was just brought to my attention that the email-to-SMS service was not working. It seems that in the network reshuffle I did last weekend, I forgot to open port 25 (SMTP) on my firewall: this is now corrected and email-to-SMS has now resumed. My apologies, and sorry for the delay; suprisingly it took 5 days before anyone complained :). On a more positive note, the internet connection has been very reliable since I made the last changes.
Monday, September 22, 2003
The changes to our network structure have now been made and hopefully things will now settle down. Pings to the outside world are about 1/2 what they used to be, and are seemingly stable. Naturally, we will monitor the situation, but in general I expect the service to be back to full capacity again. Thank you for your patience and feel free to drop me a line if there are any further problems with down-time.
Sunday, September 21, 2003
As you may have noted, the server was moved a couple of weeks back in an attempt to improve reliability. Previously most of the outages had been due to failures on the behalf of the internet provider I was using, and therefore I moved the server in an attempt to simultaneously change provider and add a 'backup' internet connection should the first connection fail. From this respect, the move was successful. However, a side-effect of the move was that the server is now connected to the outside-world via a couple of 802.11g links (don't worry, I'm using 128bit encryption and MAC address filtering to protect your privacy). Sadly the links proved to be slightly unreliable and over the last week there have been various short outages (generally no longer than a couple of minutes) when the link went 'down'. I have therefore spent most of today and will continue tomorrow in reconfiguring the internal network. Once the system is complete, there will be 4 redundant routes from the server to the outside world, each following a different physical route. I hope you will bare with me whilst these changes are made, and promise a much more reliable service as from tomorrow evening at the latest.
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
After a long in-depth analysis of the pricing of messages and the history of vgsmail over the last 6 months, I am now announcing a more permanent fix to the pricing structure to account for the previously mentioned changes in charges by down-stream providers. The change will take affect from some point after Friday 19th September, although the exact date depends on when I have finished testing the new code. Before getting upset with me, please note the following:
I have tried very very hard to keep the costs down and I make NO profit from running this service. Indeed, I am currently running at an unsustainable loss, and even after the following changes I will probably still make a very small, but manageable, loss.
Costs to destinations such as UK T-Mobile and UK Vodafone have gone up by 50% in the last few months. Of our traffic, almost 30% is destined for one of those two networks;
Costs to countries such as Austria and Germany have rocketed by a good 250%.
You should also notice that the cost per message to many many destinations has actually decreased.
As always, the greater our throughput, the easier it is for us to get bulk message deals and any subsequent savings will be passed on directly to our users. So tell your friends...
So here are the new charges effective this weekend. Please note that charge will be based on the number of the destination mobile, and so if the mobile has been ported between networks you may be charged incorrectly: if you get in contact with me about specific destinations I can set up the appropriate routing.
UK T-Mobile: 3.8p/message
UK Vodafone: 3.8p/message
Austria: 6p/message
Germany: 6p/message
All other destinations: 3.4p/message
I have tried very very hard to keep the costs down and I make NO profit from running this service. Indeed, I am currently running at an unsustainable loss, and even after the following changes I will probably still make a very small, but manageable, loss.
Costs to destinations such as UK T-Mobile and UK Vodafone have gone up by 50% in the last few months. Of our traffic, almost 30% is destined for one of those two networks;
Costs to countries such as Austria and Germany have rocketed by a good 250%.
You should also notice that the cost per message to many many destinations has actually decreased.
As always, the greater our throughput, the easier it is for us to get bulk message deals and any subsequent savings will be passed on directly to our users. So tell your friends...
So here are the new charges effective this weekend. Please note that charge will be based on the number of the destination mobile, and so if the mobile has been ported between networks you may be charged incorrectly: if you get in contact with me about specific destinations I can set up the appropriate routing.
UK T-Mobile: 3.8p/message
UK Vodafone: 3.8p/message
Austria: 6p/message
Germany: 6p/message
All other destinations: 3.4p/message
Thursday, September 11, 2003
Following from my note last week, please note that the cost of messaging has been increased to 3.6p/message. This is only an interim measure until I have worked out a more complete restructuring of our costs; this will hopefully result in the cost of many messages returning to their previous levels while a few destinations will cost more. Please check back here regularly for updates as I hope to make the final changes over the next few days.
Friday, September 05, 2003
The status screen seems to be a bit unreliable at the moment, and I believe this is due to bad network coverage at the location of the server. I will look into installing an exterior antenna on the phone; in the meantime, do not trust the status page too much and ideally just send yourself a message if you want to check that are working correctly.
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
Important: I am now getting worried about the increase in costs of sending to some networks as charged by my service providers. Some of the providers have put up their prices by 100% in the last month, and until recently I have been hoping to bear that increase by averaging it out with the lower costs on other networks. However this situation is becoming rather difficult to maintain and vgsmail is now running at a slight loss: clearly it would be silly for me to continue in this way. Therefore I am going to be forced to make a few changes to the cost of sending messages, and inevitably this will involve a small increase. There are two structures I could follow: either a global increase (to about 4p per message), or an increase effecting only some networks (all UK networks except Orange, for example). I will do the sums and report back here towards the end of the week. If you've got any comments, feel free to email me at suggestions@vgsmail.com.
Friday, August 29, 2003
The move this morning went slightly less smoothly than expected, although the server is back up and running. I hope that things will now return to the stable state they were in before last weeks downtime. No further scheduled downtime is planned for the time being.
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
During the morning of Friday 29th August vgsmail will be down for a few hours whilst the server is relocated. As a consequence of the outage on 22 August, I have decided to completely relocate the server to a new site with two completely independent internet connections, in order to provide a more reliable service. The move is only expected to take about 30 minutes, but to cater for the unexpected, I suggest you consider the whole of Friday morning as 'at risk'.
Friday, August 22, 2003
As many of you will be aware, the server went 'down' at some point in the early morning on Wednesday, and has been down until this morning. The delay in getting the system back 'up' was due to the fact that I was off-site and had no way of accessing the server. In short, on my return I discovered that the hardware router between the server and the outside world had 'frozen'. A power-cycle is all that was necessary, and full service was immediately restored. I am now going to think about how to avoid this situation in the future, or at least find some way of minimising down-time of this nature. One solution would be to move to managed hosting or at least managed virtual hosting, although this would incur relatively significant costs and hence boast the cost of messages (something I am hoping not to do). Another solution would be to have a secondary server at a different location. I will report here as soon as I come to some conclusion, and as usual if you have any concerns, suggestions, comments, please drop me an email.
Saturday, August 16, 2003
In an attempt to transparently upgrade the hardware (and new 120G HDD) on my server, I just brought the whole thing down and the server has been unreachable for the last 30 minutes. My apologies: I was hoping to achieve this upgrade with no down-time, otherwise I would have posted a notice here and probably attempted to do the work during an off-peak moment.
Monday, July 28, 2003
For the next 2 weeks, the system will be performing a number of diagnostic tests and a reboot at 5am each morning (historically corresponding to our period of minimum traffic). This is a precautionary measure while the system is running unattended, just in case anything goes horribly wrong. A full reboot takes about 3 minutes, and during this time the system will be unavailable.
Sunday, July 27, 2003
The SMS-to-email and system status screen is now back online.
Thursday, July 24, 2003
Planned downtime: The server is now up and running in its new (temporary) location. Total downtime was about 7 minutes. All services are now running except:
SMS-to-email;
System status screen (will not update).
The server will be moved back to its original location on Sunday when these services will be resumed.
Planned downtime: The server needs to be moved this evening, and therefore it will be down for about 10 minutes at some point between 22.00 and 23.00 GMT. My apologies for any inconvenience.
SMS-to-email;
System status screen (will not update).
The server will be moved back to its original location on Sunday when these services will be resumed.
Planned downtime: The server needs to be moved this evening, and therefore it will be down for about 10 minutes at some point between 22.00 and 23.00 GMT. My apologies for any inconvenience.
Sunday, July 20, 2003
IMPORTANT: Between the 29th July and 11th August vgsmail will be running in 'unattended' mode while I am away on holiday. I will have relatively limited access to email and other systems, although I will try to monitor the system as much as possible. I doubt any problems will occur, although if anything does fail it might take a bit longer for me to get the system back up and running again. I will be checking my email as often as possible. Similarly, credits will be processed as quickly as I can, although it might take a bit longer than usual: if your account is running low, I strongly recommend you submit payment before I leave.
Friday, July 18, 2003
Outage: The "System Status" screen is now back online and SMS-to-email should be working again. The mobile attached to my computer appears to have shutdown for no particular reason. I've got a spare handset which will be used to replace the old handset as soon as a new data cable arrives.
Thursday, July 17, 2003
Outage: It appears that the mobile attached to my computer has failed again affecting the "System Status" screen as well as SMS-to-email. I'll try to sort it out today or tomorrow. All other services appear to be working fine
Tuesday, July 01, 2003
The SMS-to-email interface now supports aliases, which makes it particularly easy to send emails while you are out and about. For example, if you have an alias called 'mum' set up with the correct email address, you can send off a quick email to her by sending your SMS to +447791892547 with (for example) the text 'mum Don't forget to do my ironing!'. To send an email to someone without an alias, just use the full email address: 'someone@hotmail.com Hello, who are you?'.
Friday, June 20, 2003
17:01: Outage: Delivery is now confirmed for Vodafone and Orange; O2 and T-Mobile seem to be experiencing serious delays again.
16:44: Outage: Funny things happening with delivery to UK networks again. I've rerouted all +44 destinations and delivery to Orange appears to be restored. At present I am unsure of the state of the other networks.
16:44: Outage: Funny things happening with delivery to UK networks again. I've rerouted all +44 destinations and delivery to Orange appears to be restored. At present I am unsure of the state of the other networks.
Friday, June 13, 2003
I have been informed by one of the upstream providers that this afternoon and tomorrow they will be 'at risk' meaning that delivery might fail or be delayed. This should not affect vgsmail as messages will be rerouted through a different provider, but I just thought I would put a warning here for reference.
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
18:00: Outage: O2 has gone a bit slow again on all three providers. I think the messages are eventually making it through, but not in any sensible amount of time. Again, completely out of my control.
Tuesday, June 10, 2003
There is now an account setting which allows you to receive multiple SMS messages for every incoming email. The default is to only receive one message (i.e. the first 160 characters of the email), but this can be changed to anything up to 9 emails. This setting also applies to sending of SMS messages to other people via the email-to-SMS interface.
Usage of vgsmail is increasing steadily, although I'd rather like to give it a big boast over the next few days as I'm about to make another bulk purchase of messages: if I can increase throughput just a little bit I'll be able to reduce the cost of messages again. If you use vgsmail and are happy with it, please feel free to recommend it to friends and on any news-groups listings you frequent.
Usage of vgsmail is increasing steadily, although I'd rather like to give it a big boast over the next few days as I'm about to make another bulk purchase of messages: if I can increase throughput just a little bit I'll be able to reduce the cost of messages again. If you use vgsmail and are happy with it, please feel free to recommend it to friends and on any news-groups listings you frequent.
Sunday, June 08, 2003
23:47: Outage: Routing has been very very bad today, in particular to UK O2 and UK T-mobile destinations. I've spent most of the day playing around with the routing table but have experienced the same problem with each of three providers I have available. These things tend to sort themselves out over-night, so hopefully we'll be back to full service again tomorrow morning. This does not appear to be affecting any other destinations in any significant way.
Wednesday, June 04, 2003
Sorry for the silence over the last few days: things have been running rather nicely and there really wasn't much to report...
Version 1.2.0 of the java midlet is now available for download. The usual download locations apply (http://www.vgsmail.com/ota for over-the-air install). The following changes have been implemented:
Enhanced message sending status screen;
Alias support (go to 'Options' and 'upload aliases').
Version 1.2.0 of the java midlet is now available for download. The usual download locations apply (http://www.vgsmail.com/ota for over-the-air install). The following changes have been implemented:
Enhanced message sending status screen;
Alias support (go to 'Options' and 'upload aliases').
Friday, May 30, 2003
It seems that the web address http://sms.vgsmail.com causes problems for a few people using bizarre web caches. Therefore, feel free to use http://www.vgsmail.com for the web or wap interface.
Thursday, May 29, 2003
A couple of improvements to the WML interface:
A very rudimentary version of the 'Account History' page on the web interface is now available for you to check the delivery status of messages. I know it needs to be significantly improved, but at least you can check whether a message you sent has been delivered.
The 'alias' box has been replaced with a menu taken from your alias database: I've got no idea why I didn't do this originally, as it's obvious really... I hope it doesn't break any browsers: let me know if it does!
As someone pointed out to me recently: although I cannot provide free delivery reports to SMS, if you do have a free email-to-mobile facility (such as orange.net) to allow emails to be sent to your phone directly, you can always enable the email delivery reports on vgsmail and change your email address accordingly.
A very rudimentary version of the 'Account History' page on the web interface is now available for you to check the delivery status of messages. I know it needs to be significantly improved, but at least you can check whether a message you sent has been delivered.
The 'alias' box has been replaced with a menu taken from your alias database: I've got no idea why I didn't do this originally, as it's obvious really... I hope it doesn't break any browsers: let me know if it does!
As someone pointed out to me recently: although I cannot provide free delivery reports to SMS, if you do have a free email-to-mobile facility (such as orange.net) to allow emails to be sent to your phone directly, you can always enable the email delivery reports on vgsmail and change your email address accordingly.
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
I've had several requests for delivery reports by SMS. Unfortunately I can not provide free delivery reports to a mobile phone (as do some networks) as I am charged for each message I send out. However, if you wish to pay to receive delivery reports, the functionality is now there (just got to your 'account setup').
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
The drop-down box in the 'Send SMS' page (web interface only at the moment, although I guess there is no reason this shouldn't appear on the wap interface very shortly) has been changed slightly. It now contains a) all your aliases, and b) any other numbers you have used previously as recipients for messages.
Unfortunately I overlooked the (lack of) capabilities of the POP protocol and when I intended to provide a new mail notification facility for both IMAP and POP clients, I assumed that the POP protocol provided the ability to determine the difference between 'read' and 'unread' mail on the server. In the general case, this isn't possible, and the only work-around would be to use specific facilities available to some servers and not to others: I don't really want to do this, and so (for the time-being) I am not going to be providing email notifications for users with POP accounts. If you don't have IMAP, please shout at your system administrator, because it's far superior and you'll really appreciate it in the long run. Alternatively, I strongly recommend fastmail as a mail provider. The good news on this front is that I've had this service running flawlessly for a while now and am pretty happy with the performance.
Unfortunately I overlooked the (lack of) capabilities of the POP protocol and when I intended to provide a new mail notification facility for both IMAP and POP clients, I assumed that the POP protocol provided the ability to determine the difference between 'read' and 'unread' mail on the server. In the general case, this isn't possible, and the only work-around would be to use specific facilities available to some servers and not to others: I don't really want to do this, and so (for the time-being) I am not going to be providing email notifications for users with POP accounts. If you don't have IMAP, please shout at your system administrator, because it's far superior and you'll really appreciate it in the long run. Alternatively, I strongly recommend fastmail as a mail provider. The good news on this front is that I've had this service running flawlessly for a while now and am pretty happy with the performance.
Monday, May 26, 2003
Now that delivery reports seem to be working relatively well, you can select to have them sent to your email address (go to 'account setup' on the web-interface). At present this is a global setting and you'll receive a delivery report for each and every message sent from your account. Please note, however, that the lack of a delivery report does not mean that your message has now been delivered: some providers seem to be a bit slow at sending me delivery reports, even though delivery of messages is pretty good. On the other hand, as far as I am aware, receipt of a delivery report DOES confirm that the message was successfully delivered to the recipient's mobile.
Thursday, May 22, 2003
We're featured on the UK Guide To SMS Text Sites.
I'm still noticing the occasional problem with delivery to O2 and T-mobile numbers. I'm told by the upstream providers that O2 have been causing problems recently. I am currently considering providing a much more reliable route to some numbers at a premium charge (probably about GBP0.045 per message): I don't like the idea, but if reliability falls below an acceptable level I guess I'll have no choice. Comments welcomed.
After a fair amount of fighting I am now getting delivery reports from all three of my providers. Two of them (currently used for all but UK T-mobile and UK O2) provide immediate updates, the final one will only be updated every 60 seconds.
I'm still noticing the occasional problem with delivery to O2 and T-mobile numbers. I'm told by the upstream providers that O2 have been causing problems recently. I am currently considering providing a much more reliable route to some numbers at a premium charge (probably about GBP0.045 per message): I don't like the idea, but if reliability falls below an acceptable level I guess I'll have no choice. Comments welcomed.
After a fair amount of fighting I am now getting delivery reports from all three of my providers. Two of them (currently used for all but UK T-mobile and UK O2) provide immediate updates, the final one will only be updated every 60 seconds.
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
15:10: I have located the 'service status' problem to some code which seems to have gone wrong at my end. More generally, messages appear to be flowing again, but I'll keep an eye on things and post here if we go down again.
14:22: Outage: Following some tests, it appears that not one of my three providers are currently delivering to any of the UK networks in a reliable fashion. I believe this is a problem with the networks themselves, as it seems unlikely that all three providers would fail simultaneously. Some messages are making it through, but short of waiting there is not a lot I can do at present.
The 'service status' indicator seems to be suggesting that vgsmail is 'down', although as far as I can tell messages are being delivered to all numbers other than the mobile use on this screen... I'll continue to investigate, but in short: don't trust the service indicator for the time being.
14:22: Outage: Following some tests, it appears that not one of my three providers are currently delivering to any of the UK networks in a reliable fashion. I believe this is a problem with the networks themselves, as it seems unlikely that all three providers would fail simultaneously. Some messages are making it through, but short of waiting there is not a lot I can do at present.
The 'service status' indicator seems to be suggesting that vgsmail is 'down', although as far as I can tell messages are being delivered to all numbers other than the mobile use on this screen... I'll continue to investigate, but in short: don't trust the service indicator for the time being.
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
There have been a few delayed delivery issues with T-mobile and O2 today. I have routed messages to +4478 numbers through a different provider which should solve the problem. However, if you've noticed any other number ranges which are having problems please drop me an email (deliverfail@vgsmail.com).
Sunday, May 18, 2003
Added NatWest 'Fastpay' to payment methods.
Saturday, May 17, 2003
I have just checked in a very first step towards mail notification by SMS. It's rather experimental, so use at your own risk... Currently, only IMAP server support is available, although I'll be including POP and Hotmail support very soon. The system works by logging into your mail server at regular intervals (called the 'check frequency' on the setup page) and looks for any new mail in your inbox. If that mail is still 'unread' after a predefined time ('page threshold') a message will be sent to your mobile telling you that you have new mail. The clever part is that if you are sitting in front of your computer (and therefore read the new mail as it arrives) you will not be paged!
I'd just like to make it clear that all information stored on my system is confidential. I only allow ssh access and am the only person with such access. The only case in which I will divulge information to any 3rd parties is as required to do so by UK law.
I'd just like to make it clear that all information stored on my system is confidential. I only allow ssh access and am the only person with such access. The only case in which I will divulge information to any 3rd parties is as required to do so by UK law.
Friday, May 16, 2003
I've been asked a few times now (FAQ is being written) how to create a largish list of recipients (such as all your friends). At the moment I don't have any internal support for lists, but IMHO a better solution is to use the email-to-SMS capabilities. Just create a mailing list in Outlook or Pine or whatever you use for your email with each of the recipients of your SMS list in the format 07971123456@sms.vgsmail.com or youralias@alias.vgsmail.com. For instance, create a mailing list called family which might contain dad@alias.vgsmail.com, mum@alias.vgsmail.com and dog@alias.vgsmail.com. You'll need to authenticate the message by either putting your userid and password on the subject line, or enabling from-line authentication (account setup).
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
With the overwhelming demand since my posts on uk.telecom.mobile, I've been forced to reduce the 'free credit' to GBP0.50 otherwise I'm just not going to be able to make things add up. I'll see how things go at this rate for a while and if the numbers add up I'll give all beta-tests a freebie.
Monday, May 12, 2003
22:27: Full service has been restored. For those interested, it turned out that the power supply on the mobile attached to my server had failed. It probably failed a few days ago and the phone ran on batteries for a while. I've replaced the power supply. In the short term, there isn't a lot I can do to avoid this particular problem, although had it happened any other day of the week I would have been able to resolve it as soon as I discovered the problem. In the long term, I intend on getting an internal GSM modem.
Outage: The SMS-to-email service is currently 'down' apparently due to a hardware failure. I can't access the hardware from my current location and so I don't have any idea how serious this is, but the service will definitely not be restored until this evening. The outage ONLY AFFECTS:
SMS-to-email;
System status indicator (which will, correctly, indicate 'down').
All other services are currently working correctly: web-to-SMS, wap-to-SMS, java midlet SMS sending and email-to-SMS. My apologies for the down-time.
Outage: The SMS-to-email service is currently 'down' apparently due to a hardware failure. I can't access the hardware from my current location and so I don't have any idea how serious this is, but the service will definitely not be restored until this evening. The outage ONLY AFFECTS:
SMS-to-email;
System status indicator (which will, correctly, indicate 'down').
All other services are currently working correctly: web-to-SMS, wap-to-SMS, java midlet SMS sending and email-to-SMS. My apologies for the down-time.
Friday, May 09, 2003
Account history page now resolves destinations to aliases.
I've just uploaded a completely new email-to-SMS implementation. Please play and report any problems: I personally prefer this to logging in to the web all the time when I want to send a message whilst sitting at my computer. This code SHOULD cope with MIME encoded messages and other nasty things. At present, only the first 160 characters of the message are forwarded: this will be changed in the very near future. Functionality is as follows:
To send a message, address it to THEMOBILENUMBER@sms.vgsmail.com (for example 07971123456@sms.vgsmail.com). If you have an alias defined, send the message to myalias@alias.vgsmail.com (for example dad@alias.vgsmail.com). To authenticate the message, you have two options:
On the subject line, put "userid password" (for example, "me mysecret");
Or enable "from-line authentication" in the account setup and just send the message from your registered email account.
You can give out the address of your mobile phone as userid@sms.vgsmail.com, and anything coming in to that address will be forwarded to you. To enable this feature, you have to enable the "accept incoming email" feature in the account setup;
I've just uploaded a completely new email-to-SMS implementation. Please play and report any problems: I personally prefer this to logging in to the web all the time when I want to send a message whilst sitting at my computer. This code SHOULD cope with MIME encoded messages and other nasty things. At present, only the first 160 characters of the message are forwarded: this will be changed in the very near future. Functionality is as follows:
To send a message, address it to THEMOBILENUMBER@sms.vgsmail.com (for example 07971123456@sms.vgsmail.com). If you have an alias defined, send the message to myalias@alias.vgsmail.com (for example dad@alias.vgsmail.com). To authenticate the message, you have two options:
On the subject line, put "userid password" (for example, "me mysecret");
Or enable "from-line authentication" in the account setup and just send the message from your registered email account.
You can give out the address of your mobile phone as userid@sms.vgsmail.com, and anything coming in to that address will be forwarded to you. To enable this feature, you have to enable the "accept incoming email" feature in the account setup;
Thursday, May 08, 2003
Just reconfigured httpd to optimize for speed and the pages seem to appear a lot quicker for me now: let me know if it causes any problems.
Full message details (including text) are now available from the 'account history' page by clicking the message you are interested in.
Full message details (including text) are now available from the 'account history' page by clicking the message you are interested in.
Tuesday, May 06, 2003
The rather slow loop-back tests which have run today seem to be a bug in the loop-back timer, and do not accurately reflect delivery time. I think I have fixed the code.
A very small change has been made to the java client (you should now get a 'message sending' alert before being returned to the text composition page). Usual OTA update should get you version 1.1.1 (http://sms.vgsmail.com/ota).
A very small change has been made to the java client (you should now get a 'message sending' alert before being returned to the text composition page). Usual OTA update should get you version 1.1.1 (http://sms.vgsmail.com/ota).
Monday, May 05, 2003
More web-page cleaning underway.
Account options (including the 'from-line' authentication) can now be changed in the web-interface. Keep an eye on this page: many more options coming soon.
Account options (including the 'from-line' authentication) can now be changed in the web-interface. Keep an eye on this page: many more options coming soon.
Sunday, May 04, 2003
Web-pages cleaned up a bit and are more consistent. I've tried to avoid using anything which might break browsers, but I have used tables quite extensively. If this causes any problems, and the wap interface isn't an alternative, please let me know and I'll provide a stripped down version.
I'm now getting ready for the official release, which will involve a few days of code-tidying and bug checking. As part of this process, there is now a system status page.
I'm now getting ready for the official release, which will involve a few days of code-tidying and bug checking. As part of this process, there is now a system status page.
Saturday, May 03, 2003
New midlet version released. If you did an over-the-air install originally, you should be able to do 'check version' on your phone and it will automatically update to version 1.1.0; otherwise browse to http://sms.vgsmail.com/ota or download the jar and jad directly. Changes:
Support for aliases (in the 'destination number' screen, select 'enter alias');
Threaded-sending: sending of the message is now performed in the background;
Bug fixes including the bug which appeared to delete the stored userid and password at random intervals.
Support for aliases (in the 'destination number' screen, select 'enter alias');
Threaded-sending: sending of the message is now performed in the background;
Bug fixes including the bug which appeared to delete the stored userid and password at random intervals.
Friday, May 02, 2003
Midlet reported to work on Nokia 3650 and hence the 7650. Watch this space: new version out at some point over the weekend including alias support.
Two issues at the moment:
First, delivery of messages. I have had a few reports of non-delivered messages. Happily, it seems that the new delivery reports are working (see yesterday's item): I have had no reports of messages having been marked as 'delivered' when they haven't. In total, the failure rate seems to be about 3%, of which most of those appear to correspond to phones which were switched off at the time of sending. I promise I am investigating each and every message, and won't stop until I get the failure rate down to 1% over a 5 day period: this is what I estimate the Orange SMSC to be based on my usage over a number of years.
And payment. The beta-test is costing me a fair bit, so I've reduced the free allocation for any subscribers signing up to GBP1.00 (which is still 30 free messages!). I am quite generous in giving more free messages to people who help up with suggestions, bug reports and general support. If you need more credit, I can currently accept NoChex (Paypal to arrive soon). Just click on the link above. You can send any quantity you like and it will appear on your account as soon as I receive notification (currently, this is not automated so it will take a short while, especially over night or weekends). Please note: this is a non-profit venture. At present, I am hoping to recupe my costs by a very very small (about 1%) mark-up on the cost of sending messages. Therefore, please be sensible in the quantities you send via NoChex (if they are too small, the relative costs will get too big and I'll have to increase the cost of sending messages).
Two issues at the moment:
First, delivery of messages. I have had a few reports of non-delivered messages. Happily, it seems that the new delivery reports are working (see yesterday's item): I have had no reports of messages having been marked as 'delivered' when they haven't. In total, the failure rate seems to be about 3%, of which most of those appear to correspond to phones which were switched off at the time of sending. I promise I am investigating each and every message, and won't stop until I get the failure rate down to 1% over a 5 day period: this is what I estimate the Orange SMSC to be based on my usage over a number of years.
And payment. The beta-test is costing me a fair bit, so I've reduced the free allocation for any subscribers signing up to GBP1.00 (which is still 30 free messages!). I am quite generous in giving more free messages to people who help up with suggestions, bug reports and general support. If you need more credit, I can currently accept NoChex (Paypal to arrive soon). Just click on the link above. You can send any quantity you like and it will appear on your account as soon as I receive notification (currently, this is not automated so it will take a short while, especially over night or weekends). Please note: this is a non-profit venture. At present, I am hoping to recupe my costs by a very very small (about 1%) mark-up on the cost of sending messages. Therefore, please be sensible in the quantities you send via NoChex (if they are too small, the relative costs will get too big and I'll have to increase the cost of sending messages).
Thursday, May 01, 2003
By popular demand, the web form now includes a character count. Thanks to Neil for the javascript code. I hope it doesn't break anyone with a limited functionality browser: if so, let me know and I'll maintain a script-free page.
The new provider I am using provides delivery reports back to me, which (in theory) should accurately confirm delivery. I have updated the 'account history' page to reflect these reports. You can test this by turning off your phone and sending a message to yourself: the status should go 'pending' to 'submitted' to 'waiting' (and then when you turn your phone back on) to 'delivered'. Again, let me know if the reports are inaccurate.
Request: I'm now routing messages through two different providers in order to maximize reliability. However, I need to be informed if a message does not arrive so that I can update the routing tables. If you know a message has not been delivered (and for this purpose, a message which takes more than 5 minutes to arrive should be counted as having "not arrived"), please email deliverfail@vgsmail.com with an approximate time of sending and the destination number (or at least the first 5 digits of the number). If you know the destination network, that would also help.
13:58 BST: Report: I have had no response from my current provider, so I have temporarily rerouted UK-bound messages. They are now coming through again. Sorry about the on-going issues, but I guess that's what a beta-test is all about. In future, I now have a mechanism in mind to enable this switch at the first hint of a problem. I have re-queued all messages sent since 8.30 this morning: you won't be charged for the redelivery (although the 'send time' might appear a bit strange on your account history).
Outage: Once again I have been failed by my SMS provider. They are accepting messages, but they seem to be disappearing. I've logged a fault with them and will report back as soon as I get a response. I have set a deadline: if this issue is not resolved conclusively today I will switch providers (I've got an alternative up and ready... just a matter of flicking the switch).
The new provider I am using provides delivery reports back to me, which (in theory) should accurately confirm delivery. I have updated the 'account history' page to reflect these reports. You can test this by turning off your phone and sending a message to yourself: the status should go 'pending' to 'submitted' to 'waiting' (and then when you turn your phone back on) to 'delivered'. Again, let me know if the reports are inaccurate.
Request: I'm now routing messages through two different providers in order to maximize reliability. However, I need to be informed if a message does not arrive so that I can update the routing tables. If you know a message has not been delivered (and for this purpose, a message which takes more than 5 minutes to arrive should be counted as having "not arrived"), please email deliverfail@vgsmail.com with an approximate time of sending and the destination number (or at least the first 5 digits of the number). If you know the destination network, that would also help.
13:58 BST: Report: I have had no response from my current provider, so I have temporarily rerouted UK-bound messages. They are now coming through again. Sorry about the on-going issues, but I guess that's what a beta-test is all about. In future, I now have a mechanism in mind to enable this switch at the first hint of a problem. I have re-queued all messages sent since 8.30 this morning: you won't be charged for the redelivery (although the 'send time' might appear a bit strange on your account history).
Outage: Once again I have been failed by my SMS provider. They are accepting messages, but they seem to be disappearing. I've logged a fault with them and will report back as soon as I get a response. I have set a deadline: if this issue is not resolved conclusively today I will switch providers (I've got an alternative up and ready... just a matter of flicking the switch).
Wednesday, April 30, 2003
Outage: At 20.43 last night the SQL server process shut-down, basically meaning that nothing was working thereafter. I did not realise anything was wrong until 5.42 this morning when service was returned. At the moment I have no idea what caused mysql to die. I will also look into creating some mechanism for informing me (by email and SMS) of problems so that I can fix them as soon as possible.
Tuesday, April 29, 2003
Wap-to-SMS client now accepts aliases.
Outage: I have just learnt to never commit a change (however small) without running my full set of test-cases against the live code. Anyone trying to send a message via the WAP page will have had trouble for the last hour or so: this is fixed... sorry.
Slight decrease in cost of messages to reflect a bulk purchase I have just made.
The java client has now been reported to run on the following Nokia phones: 6100, 6310 and 7250. As yet, no-one has contacted me with a non-Nokia phone.
'Aliases' can now be defined in the web-interface. They are also currently only active for SMS sending in the web-interface, but will shortly be used in all interfaces. Email sent to myalias@alias.vgsmail.com will be redirected appropriately, and the aliases will also be used in the sms-to-email interface.
Outage: I have just learnt to never commit a change (however small) without running my full set of test-cases against the live code. Anyone trying to send a message via the WAP page will have had trouble for the last hour or so: this is fixed... sorry.
Slight decrease in cost of messages to reflect a bulk purchase I have just made.
The java client has now been reported to run on the following Nokia phones: 6100, 6310 and 7250. As yet, no-one has contacted me with a non-Nokia phone.
'Aliases' can now be defined in the web-interface. They are also currently only active for SMS sending in the web-interface, but will shortly be used in all interfaces. Email sent to myalias@alias.vgsmail.com will be redirected appropriately, and the aliases will also be used in the sms-to-email interface.
Monday, April 28, 2003
OTA install of java client available. Just browse to http://sms.vgsmail.com/ota on your phone. The total download should be about 5k.
A couple of bug-fixes to the java client. If you have downloaded the java client, check that you have version 1.0.1. If not, get it here: jar and jad.
A couple of bug-fixes to the java client. If you have downloaded the java client, check that you have version 1.0.1. If not, get it here: jar and jad.
Sunday, April 27, 2003
Java Client now available for download and testing. It has only been tested on a Nokia 6100, but should probably work on any Nokia phone. Please email me if you have a different java-capable phone so that we can get it working. Download the following two files (version 1.0): jar and jad. Within the client, you need to set your vgsmail userid and password (under 'options'), and thereafter sending messages is identical to sending messages directly from your phone (but 1/3 of the cost :). The client requires web-access which you will probably have to enable on your phone.
Someone just reminded me that the following has not been made clear. If you wish to auto-login and cookies aren't working for you (i.e. as long as you don't click on 'log-out', a cookie will be stored on your machine/phone and next time you go to http://sms.vgsmail.com/cgi/default.cgi you should automatically be logged in), you can simply bookmark the following page to avoid having to type in your password each time:
http://www.vgsmail.com/cgi/default.cgi?.State=1&u=myuserid&p=mypassword
Someone just reminded me that the following has not been made clear. If you wish to auto-login and cookies aren't working for you (i.e. as long as you don't click on 'log-out', a cookie will be stored on your machine/phone and next time you go to http://sms.vgsmail.com/cgi/default.cgi you should automatically be logged in), you can simply bookmark the following page to avoid having to type in your password each time:
http://www.vgsmail.com/cgi/default.cgi?.State=1&u=myuserid&p=mypassword
Saturday, April 26, 2003
Wap-to-SMS now available. Just create a bookmark on your mobile to
http://sms.vgsmail.com/cgi/default.cgi
.
SMS-to-Email now available for testing. To send an email, send a text message to "+44 7791 892 547", with the destination email address as the first word. The email will be delivered with the 'From line' set to your details as stored in the database, so the recipient won't even know that the email came from your mobile. This service is free.
http://sms.vgsmail.com/cgi/default.cgi
.
SMS-to-Email now available for testing. To send an email, send a text message to "+44 7791 892 547", with the destination email address as the first word. The email will be delivered with the 'From line' set to your details as stored in the database, so the recipient won't even know that the email came from your mobile. This service is free.
Friday, April 25, 2003
A limited account history page is now available on the web.
User will be sent an email if their message fails to be delivered after the prescribed number of attempts.
User will be sent an email if their message fails to be delivered after the prescribed number of attempts.
Thursday, April 24, 2003
In 'send sms' page, previously used numbers are 'remembered' and ready for quick selection.
14:12 BST: Outage: Things seem to be looking better; queued messages have been sent. Will keep an eye on things.
14:06 BST: Outage: there appears to be a routing problem with my internet service provider. Ironic that this is the first time in a year that I've had any problems with them. Messages will be queued for sending, but will only be delivered once this issue is resolved.
Much cheaper provider being tested: if it works out (i.e. reliable), price should drop to GBP0.025 per message.
14:12 BST: Outage: Things seem to be looking better; queued messages have been sent. Will keep an eye on things.
14:06 BST: Outage: there appears to be a routing problem with my internet service provider. Ironic that this is the first time in a year that I've had any problems with them. Messages will be queued for sending, but will only be delivered once this issue is resolved.
Much cheaper provider being tested: if it works out (i.e. reliable), price should drop to GBP0.025 per message.
Wednesday, April 23, 2003
Main script now uses SpeedyPerl which should increase performance slightly.
Beta test begins. Free allocation of GBP1.50 (42 messages) for beta users: if you need more, please email me.
Sign-up process enabled and testing.
Rather rudimentary web-service now running.
Reverse billing of incoming emails allowed.
Beta test begins. Free allocation of GBP1.50 (42 messages) for beta users: if you need more, please email me.
Sign-up process enabled and testing.
Rather rudimentary web-service now running.
Reverse billing of incoming emails allowed.
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
Web service now up and running. Email to 123455@sms.vgsmail.com, userid@sms.vgsmail.com working.
