9009.11.05
It's been a long and tiresome week but things are almost back to normal. As it stands right now, mail is being processed again however the database containing the accounts was damaged beyond repair and, as Murphy's Law should have prepared me for, my backup drive has seen the end of it's days. I have re-added all the domains by hand but no longer have a list of what accounts are supposed to exist. As a temporary measure all messages are being routed to the postmaster account for each domain. Messages should not have been bounced during the downtime and any that haven't been delivered yet should be the next time the sending server retries the transaction. I've been watching messages from as far back as early AM on Sunday flooding into one Account that I've been monitoring.
I would like to assure everyone that I have been working very hard to get this straightened out. Now I need your help to wrap up this ordeal. Please send me a message from an alternate email account to russell@iworks.net with a list of email accounts that you need me to create and I will reply with a temporary password that they can be accessed with. Passwords can be changed from within the webmail settings.
Messages that were not POP'd from the server prior to the downtime no longer exist. That means that anyone solely using IMAP (read: webmail, etc.) to access their mail will have an empty folder list and inbox when they next sign in. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do about this. I myself lost some mail as I had not POP'd my account for 15 days prior. When using IMAP regularly It is good practice to connect to the server with a POP client routinely (once per day/week/month depending on usage) and archive your messages locally. Enabling the option to leave messages on the server will preserve your mail for future IMAP viewing. The method for doing this varies depending on your email client.
I have taken measures to prevent this situation from happening again including RAID1 mirroring along with an external backup routine (on a new drive!). I have also had the opportunity during this ordeal to perform many upgrades to the services that were previously offered. Most notably are a vastly improved webmail client and what I'm hoping is a major improvment on junk mail filters. About which I should note that anyone who was using the SpamManager Utility will have lost their whitelist entries. This system has been replaced by a much more robust filtering tool built into the webmail settings.
So that's it for now. The sooner I get a response, the sooner you will be able to access your mail again.
Watch this space for further updates or important info.
2009.11.04
My appologies for the delay in returning services to full capacity. Websites and DNS are up. Mail should be back up by the morning and should be queuing during the downtime.
2009.11.02
Unexpected maintenance has come up that can not be avoided and is unfortunately taking longer than expected. Services will be returned as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.