Technical Note: Mail Issues on June 8

on: 2018-06-13

Written by

On Friday morning, one of our servers had a fatal hardware crash. This affected parts of our mail infrastructure and mailing lists. Meanwhile, all services are back to normal. We would like to inform you about what happened and which problems it caused. In a nutshell: Please make sure your emails arrived and check your SMTP settings.

Unfortunately, due to the downtime, a small number of mails sent during this time to some of our mailing lists may have been lost while most have just been delayed. Please make sure that your mails sent on 8 and 9 June arrived their destination by checking the archives, and resend them if necessary. If you still experience problems, please get in touch with us.

Background: The said server lost one of its hardware components for which we weren't able to get a replacement at short notice. This forced us to migrate the setup and data to a new host. We have been able to bring the most critical service back to life within the course of the day, others were reestablished during the weekend.

At the same time, we modernised large parts of the mail infrastructure, for instance anti-spam measurements. This also involves a change in our SMTP setting for people using this service: From now on we will no longer accept mails delivered to port 25. Please make sure to use port 587 if you would like to send emails, and make sure the settings in your email clients match our recommendations.

Please excuse the inconveniences this caused. We will work hard to prevent such a long downtime of a critical service in the future. If you would like to support our technical team, please don't hesitate to reach out to our System Hackers.