vfemail down?

[cahero]

In any case paid or free if you use webmail when you are at your computer then it's down for everyone....especially if the webpage is gone....lol

The "24 hours" is up shortly....I have an important decision to make real soon. I'm still hoping for the best but ready to migrate if I have to. No choice really.

[music4praise]

It went down between 5:30 and 6:00pm EDT yesterday (Sunday June 17). The first thing I noticed was that it couldn't connect to the database.

The web interface was up briefly today. It looked like everything was still all there. I looked at a couple of emails that I hadn't gotten around to. No new email had arrived, however. Obviously nothing is up presently.

Last month I exchanged several emails with the owner. He indicated that his servers have been under unrelenting attack from would-be hackers. I manage a server room in a library myself and can attest to the volume of hacking attempts in general. Many of the recent ones have been attempts to break in through the mail software. It is a bit self-defeating to set the firewall to block those ports while you are running an email service.

Strong passwords on accounts and other common IT measures can do an effective job against being hacked, but your system is still going to have difficulties because the computing resources are being used to reject the hacking attempts. I'm not saying that this is the cause of the current outage, but it wouldn't surprise me.

9:45pm -- just noticed the site is back up.

[davy51]

Front page is back up but still cant get to webmail

Saw this on the front page

http://is.gd/rbnGYy


ALERT!!!! Due to unforseen circumstances users will not be able to retrieve any mail for the next 24 hours.
Incoming mail will be queued for delivery. Bulk mail senders can still relay.
We apologize for any inconvienance this may cause. UPDATE - System has been restored, and is currently under heavy load processing queued deliveries and user requests. Users may retrieve mail, but it will be slower than normal.

[cahero]

Davy....that exact message showed up earlier in the day which game me hope,,,but then the page disappeared again. I actually logged in although it was completely non-functional.
Still hoping it resolves tonight or I have a big problem.

[davy51]

i have my fingers crossed to

[music4praise]

It is looking very bad this morning. Except for a few emails that have trickled in from yesterday, the newest email showing up is from late August 2011. I notified the admin.

[davy51]

Posted on VFE forum at about 7pm admins time

http://is.gd/475Ciu


The issues -
On June 16th a drive in the main server 'died'. This is usually not an issue, and is replaced when convenient.
On June 17th, the server had a kernel panic and refused to mount the volume that contains all mail and the bad drive. After hours of troubleshooting, I was able to remotely upgrade the server and remount the bad volume.
On June 18th, the server had another kernel panic and began a reboot cycle. I was on a plane coming home.
I was able to start working on the server at about 8pm. I spent many hours trying to recover the pool. Tried different operating systems and many different configurations. I believe there is a hardware problem with that server, as it no longer even loads SQL correctly (different volume).

[cahero]

Reading the vfemail forum now and it's not good news......looks like time to move on....
I've been afraid of this for a while...there has been too much service interruption lately, and it looks like I waited just a little too long.

Looks like the owner might be calling it quits anyway. Either that or he's just dishearted at the moment.

I'll wait one more day....I'm hard headed.

[GregGeiger]

I use Vfemail for business, and I am waiting to hear back from a couple of jobs I applied for using my vfemail account... Any news on what's going on?

[sss]

I have been with VFEmail for 6 years now and have found it to be excellent value for money when you look at what others have on offer out there.

Yes, it has had it's moments where it has been off line, but that is part of life on the internet.

You should be keeping your own backups of your emails, AFAIK no email provider guarantees backups of their email.

What people need to keep in mind is that VFEmail is not some large corporate company with flashy offices and a bunch of executives and shareholders.

It is a one man show, where Rick busts his balls keeping the system running for us, doing so in his own time and also works his day job (which pays him).

If you have never run your own servers and had the eternal and never ending task of nurturing, caring and feeding them, the you can never truly appreciate the dedication that Rick puts into VFEmail to keep us running with our email.

I know this for a fact becuase I also used to run an ISP many years ago and run my own email servers with the constant work of making sure they were always running, monitoring, updated software and secure.

Rick is a much stronger man than I will ever be in this arena; I could never match his mental stamina.

Remeber Rick has been doing this for OVER 10 YEARS BY HIMSELF and he must be supported for providing this service to us. It is no free lunch, it is HARD WORK and not many understand what that is like to do by yourself.

It also costs money, so I'm asking people who have signed up with free accounts, upgrade to a paid account. And those with a lifetime account, upgrade it to an annual account.

I had THREE lifetime (single payment) accounts which I have been using for all these years without additional cost to me.

Today I upgraded all 3 accounts to yearly subscriptions. The funds will assist Rick in keeping everything running.

This recent issue was caused by hardware failure, and Rick was away with his family when it turned to custard, so he had to come back and fix it all up.

I know he is doing everything a man on his own possibly can, to get everything up and going again. It will be a bit bumpy, up and down until things settle, but he will fix it. He always fixes it.

Remember, if Rick throws in the towel on this, we will all have to go and look for a new provider and it will be very different pricing.

Support the man who supports us.

For the record, I am not associated with VFEmail in any way, other than I am a satisfied customer for over 6 years.

[GregGeiger]

No worries.. I am a paid account member.. Been for several years. I realize things break. My question is will it be back up? The rumors on here saying Rick was going to walk away from everything got me nervous. That would be very sad if he did.

I've been noticing several issues though. I think someone hacked my e-mail.. A few weeks ago, I got a couple of "test" e-mails from Microsoft Outlook. I thought that was strange because I never use Outlook. And, all my e-mails were showing up as read. I changed my password, and had no problems the system crash.. There must have been some hackers getting into the system as well.

[cahero]

Any rumors about the future of the service were caused by this statement in the vfemail forum by the owner himself when he said.....

"I'm honestly wondering if this is worth it - it is not profitable, and doesn't bring me much joy anymore."

As I mentioned in my earlier post here....I was hoping he is just temporarily disheartened. I have 2 paid accounts....although only one is a yearly subscription and will upgrade to a higher level plan as soon I am sure that the service is definitely in it for the long haul.
Is it possible that this situation (if the service is strengthened) could actually attract more customers?

It's still a wait and see situation for me. However, the owner probably needs to make some statement about his plans for the future of the service.

[communicant]

What evil force has been doing mischief in the "good guy" realms of the email universe during the past week or so? First the OpenMail outage, now the problems at VFEmail. They are two one-man-shops that are also really good services -- serious, well run, sensitive to privacy and much valued by their users. Ian Armstrong and Rick Romero are good programmers and both have chosen to spend a lot of time and effort on their respective services, to the benefit of their users.

Most of the small and independent email providers are either gone now or not appropriate for any serious or important use, but OpenMail.cc and VFEmail.net are two outstanding exceptions that provide serious and useful options for a certain sort of user.

I value both services and would be hard put to find a replacement for either one of them. I was very glad to read Ian's reaffirmation of his intention to keep OpenMail going for the foreseeable future, and I hope that Rick will do the same for VFEmail. Best wishes to both of them!

[GregGeiger]

vfemail is up now.. but I changed my password during this mess thinking someone was hacking my account, because all my messages for the last 6 months were gone.. My password is screwed up.. I can send using the old password, but I can't receive mail..

[jljl]

Originally Posted by sss

You should be keeping your own backups of your emails, AFAIK no email provider guarantees backups of their email.

My girlfriend did keep an offline copy her emails. She was using Thunderbird, which fetches over IMAP and keeps local copies. She users a local client precisely to avoid losing mails in case the provider shuts suddenly - as it happened to her before with a webmail provider.

Quite reasonably then, she thought Thunderbird's local copy meant the mails would be safe in the event of the provider going down.

She was - they are completely safe if the provider goes down.

Unfortunately, in this case, vfemail did some strange thing with partial recovery of messages, with the effect that over IMAP it effectively told Thunderbird to delete all of its local copies of messages from August 2011.

So imagine the panic, if you can, as my girlfriend logs in, then sees her emails disappearing one by one from her folders right in front of her eyes, and in some cases whole folders disappearing, while she watches... Can't do anything about it, can't stop them disappearing. Each new folder she clicks, briefly shows the folder's contents, then those disappear too

Now almost all mails from August 2011 appear to be gone, and she is upset. Being disabled and almost housebound, they are her main contact with many people, including official stuff like the landlord, medics and therapists, and she doesn't have a record of all the addresses.

She thought she'd done the right thing, using Thunderbird and offline storage was the way to keep safe from mail provider failure.

This effect from vfemail's partial recovery, nuking the local copies, surprised us both. At least for my girlfriend, it would have been better if vfemail stayed offline until it was ready.

I am hoping (nervously), if Rick gets the old messages merged back in later, that now that Thunderbird recorded those erroneous message deletions, that Thunderbird doesn't end up synchronising those deletions back to the server, wiping out the recovered messages permanently It's a worrying possibility.

I have taken copies of all her Thunderbird files and will be poring through them at a low level to try and recover whatever I can from its data files. I don't know if it'll be successful.