Most everyone expects email to work. We understand delays and disruptions can be frustrating, and we apologize for any inconvenience caused by yesterday's outbound mail flow problem.

The update that caused some services to not restart on the outbound gateway servers is believed to be the root cause. The team has repaired the servers.

Despite restarting services and performing typical remediation steps, the processing time grew to just below 30 seconds per message. The delay created a chain reaction that led to a significant backlog of messages in the queues.

• The backlog also caused the gateway to stop accepting new connections once the system’s resources were at capacity.

  • Servers trying to relay through Mailprotector’s smarthost were holding onto messages for up to several hours.
  • Until the email servers could hand messages off to the Mailprotector smarthost relay, the email servers continued to retry the connections.
  • Multi-function devices and scanners do not have intelligent email processing and experienced errors when the relay would not accept the devices' connection requests.

• The team took steps to process the backlog as quickly as possible and identified a way to reduce message processing time to the typical 1 second or less.

  • As the backlog drained from the queues, the smarthost relay began accepting new connections from email servers.
  • The backlog of messages on email servers caused temporary delays as new surges of messages came through.
  • At approximately 10:30 PM ET, the outbound mail flow returned to normal operation.

Additional processes are being implemented to mitigate possible future delays at the outbound gateway.

Mailprotector aims to provide near 100% uptime because we know how important email is. As with any technology, especially an actively developed solution, unforeseen problems can occur. Our team learns from every incident and tries to eliminate the possible recurrence of events in the future.

Thank you for your continued partnership with Mailprotector.