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As you may have noticed over the past few weeks, the SPAM levels have increased slightly. Unfortunately, even a slight increase in the SPAM levels as a percentage can result in getting a piece or two an hour as opposed to a piece or two a day. Yesterday we finally isolated the issue that was causing this thanks to a few of our partners and the new ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 addin. We are still working on automating the distribution and monitoring of the new processes that will keep this from coming up again.
Further Details
ExchangeDefender has multiple grids around the world. All grids use a central RBL distribution database that is centrally managed and monitored. Every grid has it’s own DNS caching servers that hold both the RBL data as well as our clients IP address information for delivery, routing and SPAM definitions. Since the latest update to our core distribution the DNS server performance has been flaky and would simply stop returning results. Because our RBL code is set to look for matches in the RBL zone the servers lack of response, or lack of correct response, means that the messages that were certainly SPAM were allowed to go through the less-restrictive SPAM scanning and unfortunately that contributes to 1-2% difference in the SPAM load and in some cases latency for nodes that are about to go into the shutdown/maintenance mode and are flushing out their queues. Because ExchangeDefender delivery queues run off the same DNS infrastructure (technical limitation) this compounds the problem and issues as the resolutions do not come from the primary (on-node) or secondary (on-grid) but a tertiary (central OWN NOC) DNS server.
What we have done so far is implementing a system that does local resolver check and restarts the DNS service if it is not returning proper data.
What we are currently working on is a monitoring system to centrally report the issues with the resolver latency (one of the things we currently do not measure) as the lookups have to skip to the secondary or tertiary systems.
We expect to have all the issues handled by the end of the weekend. From statistical breakdowns we know that the issue has not been widespread (only certain users would even have noticed the difference) and only about a dozen people have complained so far. Unfortunately for us, the people likely to notice are the people that get the most mail and the ones that likely love our product the most. We’ll get this one taken care of for you folks, thanks for your patience.
Happy Monday! Over the weekend a ton of ExchangeDefender 4 bugfix requests went online and so far the support requests for the issues have all but disappeared. Here they are, in order of magnitude:
ExchangeDefender Email SPAM Reports
Late last week new ExchangeDefender SQL cluster for email report management went online to compensate for the growth in network capacity. Because it usually takes six to eight hours for replication to complete some reports over the weekend were generated with 0’s for SPAM totals, an error that has since been fixed.
Going forward, SPAM reports will be remain to be available but we are moving the feature to the “legacy” mode meaning we do not recommend them as the primary point of access to SPAM. By default, new accounts will have their email reports turned off unless they explicitly request the email reporting to be turned on. There will be no change to the current users and as noted above there will be far more capacity to provide current users with the reports and those that choose them forward.
Email reports have been a dark eye on the face of ExchangeDefender. Over 83% of ExchangeDefender clients have never even opened an ExchangeDefender SPAM report, and nearly 99% have never released a single piece of SPAM from them. We track these releases and have even noted that majority of the releases are forged SPAM itself.
This is why we have developed better tools to surround ExchangeDefender with – the new ExchangeDefender Outlook 2007 Addin for Microsoft Outlook 2007, the ExchangeDefender Desktop Alerts for XP and Vista as well as the realtime web portal which is scheduled for 4.0 release this fall.
ExchangeDefender Password Resends
ExchangeDefender password resend request used to lead you to a blank screen and no email. This has been fixed, passwords are being sent now without issue.
ExchangeDefender Activation Optimizations
ExchangeDefender activations now take mere seconds (it used to take about 1 second to provision a single account) which globally meant it could take approximately an hour for the address to be fully provisioned. That has been throttled down to allowing over 5,000 user activations per minute.
ExchangeDefender LiveArchive Sync
Problems with ExchangeDefender LiveArchive settings sync have been addressed and synchronization is now up-to-the minute. If you’re ever stuck waiting more than 60 seconds for a password change or a setting change you might want to close your browser and retry.
