Email Hiccups
Posted (June 5th, 2008 at 10:53 am PST) by Jason CWe experienced some brief problems (no more than 20 minutes) with email accounts being inaccessible due to a permissions error. The issue was fixed fairly quickly once it was noticed tho and we apologize for any issues this might have caused.
If you feel you have lingering issues because of this matter, technical support will be happy to help you out in whatever way that they can.
Note: Some email might have been rejected due to the directories not having correct write permissions — so if you were expecting something important during this period, it would probably be best to have the message sent again.
20 Responses to “Email Hiccups”
thanks dreamhost…you rock again!!!
I’d like to know if email that was sent to me (and others) during the outage was delivered but inaccessible, or rejected due to the problems.
This is an important point that should be covered. Have we lost emails sent to us in that time, or were we just unable to access our mail?
Fools!
yes, it seems there were some rejected
Definitely agree with Steven. If I have a problem (can’t access my email…), I come to the status page. If there’s nothing posted, I assume it’s something you’re unaware of and I log in to the panel to notify support. Then on the contact support page, there’s the notification! It’s irritating enough to have these outages, it’s worse when your status page doesn’t reflect it even though you’ve written a message elsewhere claiming to be aware of the problem.
I saw a notice that the mail was down on the regular dreamhost website/control panel - but no notice was on dreamhoststatus.com.
Is there a way to get on an email list for outages?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Email, above all other services, needs to be bulletproof and have near 100% uptime, where uptime is defined as “no lost mail” not “constant mail access”. You guys are sucking the big one on this, get your act together.
Well, my email is still not sending and it’s been this way for about a day now. I have 2 open tickets about this issue and hope it can be fixed right away. PLEASE FIX MY EMAIL DREAMHOST 
Thank you.
@bdu
20 minute downtime… the first real “downtime” I’ve ever had with their mail… so 20 minutes in a year of hosting… I’d say that’s “near 100%”.
Yep get your act together Dreamhost… 20 minutes of downtime per year is FAR TOO MUCH!!!!!
quality (services offered), reliability, cost - pick 2
Y’all are right. The status page should be updated whenever a large scale issue like this happens. We normally try our best to do so, but the admin on duty who put the notice in place didn’t manage to put something up here when they should have. I had to dive in shortly after the fact and get this entry up. And while it was a bit later than it should have been, it was still better to acknowledge the fact that it occurred instead of posting nothing at all.
We’re really doing everything in our power to make our email service the sort of stable, dependable service it needs to be. As I’ve said before, if problems still persist and you want to talk this over, don’t hesitate to contact support so we can take care of you as quickly as possible.
@zerthreal
Email was down for about an hour YESTERDAY. Just because you don’t notice it, doesn’t mean the service hasn’t gone down. Two hours in two days is less than 96% uptime, which sucks.
My main email account is on dreamhost using IMAP, last week one or two messages spontaneously disappeared from my inbox. Today the past 10 days of email in my inbox just disappeared, not to mention that I’m not receiving new messages. I also tried to move a message from another folder to my inbox and once it copied to the inbox it disappeared.
If you’re using IMAP, i’d recommend that you keep local copies of the messages too.
My email has been down all day and won’t let me connect. Three different accounts that I can’t get to. Two are business accounts.
Help!!!!!!!!!!!
I would not recommend Dreamhost to my worst enemy
Dreamhost has publicly stated that e-mail is “hard”, isn’t how people shop for services and generates 50% of their service calls — that’s why they’re making it so easy to send people to Google.
I shopped around, using e-mail as my primary feature, when I found Dreamhost. If you run your own server, you’re just as likely to have 20 minutes of downtime, or more, per year. I wanted IMAP/SSL and SMTP/SSL, and Dreamhost brings both of those to the table — some hosts don’t, or don’t advertise them. Also, Dreamhost offers unlimited forwards, wheras some services limit them to 50-100+ (I create a new forward alias for every e-merchant and website that “needs” to authenticate me, so my forward list is almost 1000 between my wife and me). I have no use for all the bandwidth and storage space.
Thanks to Dreamhost for publicizing the failure / downtime, even if a little late. I’m definitely staying with Dreamhost as long as e-mail remains this reliable and they continue to offer these features — a unique combination at this price point.
Incoming email down for only about 15 minutes yesterday - was working again before i managed to compose a support ticket. Thanks guys!
I’m not so bothered by the downtime, or even the late notice (although a more timely notice would be better). What troubles me is the idea that some e-mail may have been lost, since there’s no way for me to know what e-mail might’ve been sent to me during that time.
It’s also made me a bit paranoid about similar situations. For example, right now (and for the past hour or so), I haven’t been able to send any e-mail (the smtp server is refusing connections). During this time, I’ve also not received any e-mails (even though my client is connecting to the server), and I can’t help but wonder if it’s possible that e-mails are being sent to me, but getting lost somewhere in the ether.
That is a very disturbing idea, since I count on e-mail to be a reliable method for people to get messages to me. None of the other little (and not-so-little) problems that Dreamhost has had in recent months (even that hideously ugly billing nightmare) have been sufficient to cause me to leave, but if it gets to the point where I can’t trust my e-mail… I would have to start at least considering other options.
Being unable to send mail for an hour (or more) is frustrating, but lost e-mails would be totally unacceptable.
I just verified that I am also not receiving e-mail (even though I am connecting to the pop server). So currently I can’t send (can’t connect to the smtp server) and any e-mails that are sent to me are going… somewhere, but never ending up in my mailbox.
I tried webmail, and it acts as if it’s working, but no mail ever shows up and any messages I send never actually go anywhere.
I opened a support ticket, but I thought I should post something here, in case anyone else is having similar problems.
Thanks
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It would be nice if you posted these notices when the outage occurs, not at the end. It was 45 minutes ago when the problem was first reported. What’s the point of a status page if it isn’t updated?