Mail delay on junk filtered domains
Most of our customers using junk filters on their domain(s) are experiencing delay in receiving mail. This is affecting all mail clusters, but only the domains that have junk filtering enabled through the control panel. Mail is slowly going through, but it’s still very backed up, so it will take a while to catch up. We added more machines to alleviate the problem.
Very sorry about the inconvenience! We won’t mark this post resolved until the clog is all gone, so please check back for updates.
If your domain is having delay issues despite it not being filtered, please let us know at https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=support.msg& . We’ll need details like the address affected, the full headers of the delayed message, or the sender and recipient and when the message was sent, so we can look into it for you.
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February 25th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
“We won’t mark this post resolved until the clog is all gone, so please check back for updates.”
It is much appreciated. I don’t mind problems, I just hate it when problems aren’t acknowledged or claimed to be “fixed” when they aren’t.
February 25th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Odd, I don’t have the junk filters enabled on any of my domains, but I’m still experiencing a massive slowdown and timeouts.
February 25th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Doesn’t Dreamhost have any sort of network monitoring in place to tell them when queues are getting backed up? I don’t mind problems either, but it always seems like Dreamhost is more reactionary when it comes to networking/routing/email problems. They seem to be on top of the hardware problems as I have seen them take proactive steps when hardware is beginning to fail but has not failed yet.
February 25th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
my whole site’s been down more today than it has been up (it’s currently down).
February 25th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
I don’t have any junk filters enabled either and I’m seeing delays of 2 hours for some email. Also, probably not related since it’s been happening for a few days, but one of my users has been consistently getting a “no route to host” error via webmail.
February 25th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
All our mail on our dedicated server has been down ALL DAY (over 6 hours), and we’re not junk filtering at all. We pay for callbacks and a LOT of money for this server, and I think we should be getting more updates than this. What do I tell the client about no email for an entire business day?
February 25th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
I’ve also been seeing timeouts even though my address isn’t filtered.
February 25th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
A little late to post this! Has been a problem all day, not just for an hour or so.
February 25th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Yup, I noticed this problem like around 5:00 or 6:00 EST. Seems to be better now — webmail’s working, and IMAP is much faster. [Sigh.]
February 25th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
I have new emails I can’t read and for sure one of them is an important one that I need to respond to ASAP. My webmail tells me they’re there but won’t let me read them. I’ve been with you guys for about 5 years and this is by no means the first time your servers have let me down when I needed them.
February 25th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
This has been going on since at least 10AM EST. I have also been having IMAP connection issues, which I am assuming stem from everyone reconnecting to their mail servers more often to try to get their mail. I see some things appear in the webmail but not everything…. I find myself wondering how it is possible that this is taking so long to resolve.
Does dreamhost have any better root cause for why this is happening other than it is their spam filters (i.e. increased volume, configuration problems, DOS attack on SMTP, etc) That might help with resolving it more quickly.
I too have been a long term customer of DreamHost and this is not the first time I have seen less than stellar responses to outages, as well as a lack of proactive monitoring to prevent them from happening in the first place. Yes this a budget class hosting service and you get what you pay for, but still…
February 25th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
I’ve definitely been seeing random slowdowns, and even as early as last week, had a mail spend about 24 hours in terminator.dreamhost.com. Any clues what the slowdown is? Huge spam volume? Networking equipment? Bandwidth usage?
A friend of mine reported that clamd on his system needed to be updated after lookups started taking 10+ minutes — turns out the new version was required to take advantage of new features that were tripping up the old version, or some such. Required moving to the Debian “volatile” branch, but it took response time down to a couple seconds.
February 25th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
I can’t believe this. My Fortune 100 clients all rely on your $8 shared hosting and receiving all their junk mail 100% of the time the nanosecond it hits the Internet. I am losing a lot of money because the billionaires who are paying me $40,000 an hour for my consulting are not getting offers for Viagra, assistance with IRS problems or offers to watch people engage in carnal acts with barnyard animals. I really, really hate Dreamhost and I am going to change my hosting.
February 26th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
This still a problem for anyone? I’m still having delayed email by up to 2 hours…
February 27th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
I prefer the delays over all that spam that shows up. Thanks for update.
March 6th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
There is one important factor that people seem to be forgetting.
E-Mail RFCs state that a message is not considered undeliverable if the time delay is less than 5 DAYS!
E-Mail is not an Instant Messaging protocol.
I am a SysAdmin at a major university and this is an issue we have with our users as well.
They have gotten used to e-mail delivery time of minutes or even seconds so whenever there is a delay for more than an hour they get upset and we have to remind them that e-mail was never intended for this type of communication. If you want instant communication, use an IM client where the person can respond immediately. Or pick up a phone.
My sympathies to the admins here at DreamHost as I am sure they are very stressed and working their tails off trying to get everything back up to the standard people are used to.
It is also very hard to monitor something as nebulous as e-mail. All it takes is one local site that is hosted here to have an insecurity that lets it get used as a mail relay for a spammer and all of a sudden your mail servers are all clogged with both the outgoing crap as well as all the returned messages.
March 6th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
I have a question though.
If you go into your panel and disable the Junk Filter will the new incoming messages not have the delay issue?