vgsmail: News and Updates

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.

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.

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.

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.