shell mailboxes, with outgoing mail at shell.mv.net and
mailbox access at shell.mv.net .
The upgrade will deal only with MV-side mail services. If you are
an FCG-side mail user, or a user of shell services, you might still be
using the MV-side server for outgoing mail; if so, this will affect you
too. (If not, it won't.)
WHAT'S HAPPENING:
We're upgrading the hardware as well as moving the mail services to a
clustered server arrangement. Since the hardware is being replaced,
all mailboxes need to be copied. Mail services will be turned off
while this is happening so that mailboxes don't change while being
copied.
Once the mailboxes and various other data are copied over, the mail
services will be brought back up. We don't anticipate any need for you
to make any changes, as long as you are accessing mail servers by their
service names as specified at
http://home.mv.net/support/support.shtml .
That is, if you are using the MV-side mail services you should be using
'pop.mv.net' for POP3 or IMAP access ('imap.mv.net' and 'mailbox.mv.net'
will work as well) and 'mail.mv.net' or 'smtp.mv.net' for outgoing
mail). Please make sure you are using those service names rather than
any underlying system name (e.g. not 'mercury.mv.net' or any other
unofficial service name) to help avoid being affected by this upgrade.
We don't forsee any major problems in this transition; however it is
possible that there will be some unanticipated things that need tweaking
or reinstating. Please bear with us if such things do come up.
WHY:
The upgrade has been planned for some time, in order to
keep up with increasing demands put on our mail servers and to move to a
configuration that would make it easier to add capacity. We were about
to get started on it around the end of February when, coincidentally and
as we described at the time, we began to be on the receiving end of
several different backscatter (or more properly, outscatter) storms.
(This is where somebody forges a domain in spam or other mass mailings
sent to tens of thousands of mail servers around the world; badly
configured mail servers will accept these messages and then later decide
to return the unwanted ones to the forged sender, instead of refusing
the unwanted ones in the first place.) This turned out to be somewhat
of a mixed blessing as it led us to modify the plans slightly - at the
cost of a couple of months extra effort.
HOW THIS WILL AFFECT YOU:
The new mail server setup will completely separate several
different functions which up until now have been combined. This means
that each function will be performed better, and each will be
relatively unaffected by issues with another. Benefits to you will
include more robust handling of incoming mail (and we can be less
aggressive in our automatic defenses against outscatterers, even
though for the most part they deserve to be defended against),
isolation of the effects of any incoming mail problems on outgoing
mail (and vice versa), and, similarly, isolation of POP and IMAP
services from any potential overload of incoming or outgoing mail.
Mailboxes will be larger; POP and IMAP access will be faster, and IMAP
will support full-text searches. We'll also be changing the way
mailbox quotas are handled, but that will happen in a later phase. We
also have plans to enhance the processing of both incoming and outgoing
mail, but that's a tangent for another time.
Note that some changes will continue to happen after this event;
we're doing a bit of a juggling act since we're essentially
rearranging existing services while keeping them running. This
upgrade outage is the biggest one; more of that juggling will soon
follow but we don't expect that it will require any downtime or any
changes on your part.