Service status

We are currently experiencing major disturbances in one of our data centers. This leads to big disturbances in the SpamDrain service. We are working with our hosting provider to try to solve this as soon as possible.
We apologize for the invonvenience.

Update 08:45 GMT+01: All systems are now up and running again and we are monitoring all systems carefully. There may be some minor disturbances the next hour or so due to delays caused by the recent outage.

We are experiencing delays in the delivery of domain filtered emails for one of our servers at the moment. This doesn’t affect all emails and only emails sent to domain filtered address, not POP3/IMAP filtered ones.
We are currently working on setting up new servers and fixing the faulty one and expect it to be solved later today. We regret the inconvenience.

Update: We have now solved this and moved traffic to new servers, replacing the faulty one. There should no more delays and all delayed messages should now have been delivered.

This weekend we have experienced disturbances in some of our filtering servers. We believed that we solved all problems on Sunday 3 July, but today we found some more issues which now have been resolved.

During the passed disturbances you may have experienced some delays in email delivery if using our domain filtering. If using POP3/IMAP filtering you may have gotten spam slipping through since SpamDrain hasn’t filtered your email account with the normal frequency.

We apologize the inconvenience and are monitoring all servers extra carefully the next days.

There will be some maintanance work on network infrastructure in one of the SpamDrain data centers the coming two nights (CET time):

Wednesday 05/25/2011 between 0:30am and 6:00am CET (UTC/GMT +1 hour)

Thursday 05/26/2011 between 0:30am and 6:00am CET (UTC/GMT +1 hour)

During this time you may experience down times and increased response times. If you experience problems during this time please be patient. Things should go back to normal at least after 8am.

There will be some maintanance work on network infrastructure in one of the SpamDrain data centers the coming two nights (CET time):

Wednesday 03/16/2011 between 0:30am and 6:00am CET (UTC/GMT +1 hour)

Thursday 03/17/2011 between 0:30am and 6:00am CET (UTC/GMT +1 hour)

This should not affect SpamDrain as redundant systems will maintain normal service during this time. Should you still experience problems during this time please be patient. Things should go back to normal at least after 8am.

The remaining servers will be moved the coming Monday, November 22, starting from 11.30 pm and the move should be finished on Tuesday, November 23, by 8 am CET. Once again, we have taken the necessary steps to ensure that users won’t be affected by this. Should you still experience problems during this time please be patient. Things should go back to normal at least after 8 am.

During the next few weeks our servers will be moved to a new data center. The move will be done gradually with the first servers the coming Monday, November 15, starting from 11.30 pm and will be finished on Tuesday, November 16, by 8 am CET. We have taken the necessary steps to ensure that users won’t be affected by this. Should you still experience problems during this time please be patient. Things should go back to normal at least after 8 am.

The rest of our servers will be moved at later dates and we will announce every move on our blog, Facebook and Twitter.

Last weekend we moved the domains www.spamdrain.net, pop.spamdrain.net and imap.spamdrain.net to our new servers. This means that we’re now almost completely running on the new infrastructure we first wrote about back in March. It’s taken a bit longer than we expected back then but now we’re almost there.

The only thing remaining now is to move the services providing filtering for our domain filtering customers. We will do this during the coming months and we hope this will be completed by the end of the summer. Most of you who use the domain filtering service won’t have to do anything and won’t notice. No need to change your MX records.

If you have set up your firewall as recommended in our FAQ you will only have to make sure to update the rules so that it doesn’t block the IP addresses used by our new servers. Please make sure your firewall has been configured to accept all traffic on port 25 (or the port used by your mail server) from the following IP addresses:

85.24.138.228
85.24.138.229
85.24.138.129
62.75.203.192 - 62.75.203.223 (62.75.203.192/27)

You can read more about how to configure your firewall in our FAQ (log in required).

We are currently experiencing network disturbances at our supplier. We are investigating the cause of these problems and hope they will be resolved soon.

Update: Systems are now up and running again. There may still be some disturbances the next hours. We have talked to our supplier and they were having hardware problems which caused interruptions in several parts of their network. They have now replaced necessary hardware to prevent more problems.
We apologize the inconvenience and would also like to point out that we are now entering a new phase in testing our new servers. They will increase stability and robustness and we hope to switch to the new servers really soon.

Lately we have been working hard on handling the recent growth we have had. As you probably have noticed we have had some stability problems and we apologize for that. The last weeks we have made some changes to our infrastructure and started to migrate to new servers. This work will increase performance and provide better fail over than before. We hope this work will be finished within the next 2 – 3 weeks. We’re expecting to carry out the remaining changes without any disruptions to the service.

As a necessary step we have also moved some of our system to the cloud. This will improve the performance of our database servers and will also let us handle backups more efficiently.

In parallel with this work we have also worked on making minor changes to improve the experience of the overall service, such as improving your SpamDrain reports, adding support for payments in USD and support for payments through Paypal. We have also updated our price lists so they are easier to read. The next step on the web site is to make the sign up and on boarding as easy as in our mobile applications. That will be exciting work and hopefully we will be able to help even more people to get rid of annoying and time consuming spam messages.

Until next time – we wish you e-mail peace of mind and hope that you continue reporting your spam to us. That’s what makes the SpamDrain service so fantastic!

Enligt en undersökning från Halon Security kostar sex-spam företaget 120 kr per månad och anställd i förlorad arbetstid. Lägg därtill alla andra spam och eventuella virus och trojaner som kan komma in till följd av för mycket skräppost. Även om man ska ta sådana här studier med en stor nypa salt (!) så kan man inte låta bli att räkna fram vad en typisk SpamDrain-kund sparar genom att använda SpamDrain:

Ett företag med 10 e-postkonto som filtreras av SpamDrain kostar 1 870 kr/år. Enligt Halon Security skulle det kostat företaget 120 kr x 12 mån x 10 anställda = 14 400 kr/år. Med SpamDrain sparar alltså ett företag med 10 avändare 12 530 kr/år. Ett resultat att ta med en gnutta salt . Förmodligen sparar man betydligt mer än så pga produktivare personal, mindre driftsproblem etc.

Alla priser exklusive moms.

Läs mer på IDG.

For the past week a massive attack has infected PCs by tricking users into clicking links in fake messages from CNN.com. The attack has shown little sign of ending soon. The links in the spam mails go to sites which tell you to download the Adobe Flash player to watch a movie. What actually happens when you run this file is that a trojan is installed on your computer. The trojan adds your computer to a worldwide Botnet.

The email itself looks like a completely normal message from CNN.com and some of the links in the email also go to CNN. Right now there is a similar attack in progress, although this time MSNBC.com (NBC’s and MSN’s news site) is used to mask the attack. Spam has flowed in since around 11am on Tuesday. The sites, which the spam messages link to, are most likely hijacked ones and the site owners are probably not yet aware that their sites contain malicious code.

Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 now include filters to block sites like these. However, it normally takes several days before a hijacked site has been reported to these filters. Until then, no warning will be displayed when surfing to these sites.

Due to problems with the statistics engine during Wednesday 23/1 and Thursday 24/2, the statistics in report messages of Thursday is summarized incorrectly for some of our members. We apologize for any inconvenience and the problem should be solved in the reports of Friday.

Under onsdagen 23/1 och torsdagen 24/1 har vi haft problem med vår statistikmotor. Därför har statistiken summerats fel i rapportmejlen för vissa medlemmar. Vi beklagar detta och felet ska vara åtgärdat i fredagens rapporter.