Changes to Junkmail Quarantine
Posted (July 29th, 2008 at 11:16 am PST) by jordanIf you have Dreamhost Junkmail enabled for your domain, the process of checking your junkmail quarantine has changed. Now instead of using webmail for accessing the quarantine you will now have to login to http://mailboxes.dreamhost.com with your email address and password. After this you will see a link to access the new Junkmail Quarantine. One of the new features of this upgrade is the ability to change junkmail users settings domain-wide and there will be plenty more to come. If you have any questions / problems using the new interface please feel free to contact support.
The old Junkmail interface is disabled as of now so we can sync the new system with the old. This will cause your to be unable to access junkmail for a short period of time. We expect to have the new quarantine system live by 1:00PM PDT and will resolve this post when it is complete.
UPDATE 1:29PM PDT
Unfortunately the syncing of the old and new system is taking a bit longer then we expected. Once the sync is complete the new system will be activated and more information will be added to this post.
UPDATE 7:00PM PDT
The new junkmail quarantine is live. We do apologize for the short notice of this system change but we assure you this change is for the best and is laying the ground work for many new and exciting junkmail features. You can now make changes to your junkmail users settings domain-wide via the Mail->Junkmail tab of the Dreamhost Panel and there will be more features coming in the next few weeks. Due to the amount of comments and emails received about the system change , we will be looking into giving users the option to have their junkmail quarantine show up as an IMAP folder and also integrating it into the various webmail clients we provide. If you experience any troubles with the new junkmail system please contact support and we will be happy to assist.
UPDATE 7:19PDT
We are continuing to work on issues with the new junkmail system, however the issues that have so far been seen with custom policies and forward addresses should now be resolved. Please contact support if you continue to experience problems with the new junkmail system.
86 Responses to “Changes to Junkmail Quarantine”
Exactly, I’ve never had a “@dreamhost.com” email address, so you’ve effectively barred me from my own mail. Smooth.
Morris: “I do not have an address ending in “@dreamhost.com” so my usual login does not work to veiw the junk mail quarantine.”
I’m not a dreamhost employee, (they say they don’t read the comments here), but it’s quite simple; just use youremailadress@yourdomain.com as the login name — simply ignore the “@dreamhost.com” caption next to the entry field. Would have been nice if they mentioned this.
When you click on the junk mailbox in squirrelmail, you get a link to mailboxes.dreamhost.com — to bad it’s a link to a non-secure HTTP url, even though I was logged into HTTPS on my webmail. Also too bad they don’t mention this not actually working at the moment.
Hey Dreamhost, if you rigged it so that we could access our quarantine as a folder in IMAP access, you would save me dozens of hours of labor and the necessity of switching hosts to get my non-technical users a good server-side spam management system.
Ummmm. OK, so I logged on to the site mentioned abov (ignoring the @dreamhost.com…thanks wouter) and do not see a link to the quarantine box.
I agree with Paul, just make it accessable via IMAP or pop3 and be done with it.
is this maybe the reason why – since yesterday, somewhere between noon CET and 9pm CET i started getting really abnormal amounts of junk mail (again). thanks to junkmail and quarantine settigns, in the last 2, 3 years, i got about 4 – 8 junk messagesin my inbox a day, since yesterday, i get about 30-40.
So you can’t get to the quarentine box via squirrel and can’t get to it via the method listed above, and the box keeps growing……..
Now the message (if you click the junk mail folder in squirrelmail) says it will be ready by 3:00 PDT
Well this is annoying…. I don’t want to have to log into a seperate box to manage my junkmail. Why the change?
Drew:
The change is for a couple of reasons. The major one being that not all Dreamhost customers are using Squirrelmail like they used to be. We are now offering Roundcube webmail and other webmail clients will be available in the future for customers to use. New features such as the ability to change junk mail users settings domain-wide will be included in the new version. I do apologize to all of you that are upset with the downtime and I ask you to please bare with us during the upgrade process. What we are doing today is laying the groundwork for the new and improved system that will give us the flexibility to add many of the features that customers have requested.
Ok, so how do I go about getting my junk mail? I don’t have a DreamHost account and this is really screwing me up! I need to review my Junk Mail because the system does a terrible job of separating what is Junk and what isn’t.
I have a major event this weekend and I need access to my Junk Mail to be sure no one has slipped through the cracks of this system.
HELP!
At last I can dump squirrelmail! Fantastic! Worth the wait!
HELP!
Have important docs that we believe are in Junk Mail. As everyone noted above, we don’t have @dreamhost email and NEED to view our mail. Please inform how the heck we get access to this.
90% of my new business comes via the junk mail. I check it dozens of times a day.
Please bring it back so it’s on the same interface as regular mail.
Yes, having to log on to a separate system to check junk mail is completely unacceptable. A message that comes from anyone new will just about always get filtered to junk, so this folder must be monitored regularly.
If it gets set up so that I can’t just click a link to easily review my junkmail and redirect those pieces that are not junk, it will be a major hardship, and likely cause for seeking another host. Domain-wide settings are not very important to me.
For anyone perplexed by not having an “@dreamhost.com” address, just put in your address@yourdomain.com email in that field and your email password, and you can get in just fine.
The bigger problem is that there still doesn’t appear to be any link there to “view my junkmail” or anything like that. Uhh, why is that MIA when the old method of checking it is already removed?
Morris et al…you can also go to mailboxes.yourdomain.com. From here just enter your email username, not the full email address. This leads you to the DreamHost mailbox manager from which you may change a number of email settings–not just junkmail. Unfortunately the junkmail settings are not yet available as of the time of this post.
For what it’s worth, I still love you guys.
Yes, unfortunately an exodus to another host may be in the near future. Anyone remember a billing problem that made lunarpages very happy not too long ago???
It blows my mind that time after time DH finds itself in these situations. Does anyone think that doing major system changes in the middle of the business day (outside of some defined maintenance window) is a good idea? I know email is 24/7 and you can’t please everyone, but big companies usually have a defined maintenance window and we have to put up with outages during that window.
And the whole “log on here, but don’t forget your domain, but you wouldn’t know that unless you went to a status blog” is ridiculous too. The link to junk mail should take you directly to mailboxes.yourdomain.com to avoid that confusion/inconvenience. And as others have said, it’s going to be a pain to have a different interface for regular web mail users. This seems a generally poorly thought out decisions.
It’s simple to do things right. Start by pre-announcing the outage. Then do lots and lots of testing (not on production). Then do the change. Then announce again that it’s all fine (or not). Why is this so friggin hard for DH?
I’m not threatening to leave, as so far this is just an annoyance. But it’s amazing that with all the money they’re raking in (overall, not from each of us individually) they can’t hire anyone with any IT management sense to run the show.
I have a dreamhost account and still can not locate my junk mail.?? What a royal pain in the #*%!!!
Will mail filtering be better than it is at the moment?
SpamAssassin on DH is dreadful.
Volumes are mercifully low at the moment though.
Oh yeah and I dn’t have an @Dreamhost mail either. WTF?
I can’t get into checking my spam, it isn’t accepting my password to get into junk mail. we have dream host, what should I do?
Damn, one I got the thing figured out, you change it on me. Please keep it simple!
Okay, people. Read. You don’t sign with an @dreamhost.com sign in. You sign in using your regular email address. For example, my email is henry@henryherman.com. I would not sign in as henry@dreamhost.com. I would sign in as henry@henryherman.com. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.
What remarkable bullshit! If I sign on to the mailbox manager there’s no link to check my junk mail. And, if I try to get into my account to get tech support, my password no longer works.
What is wrong with this company!?!
There is one very big question which everyone complaining here should be asking themselves. If you are this concerned about temporarily loosing access to your junk mail, then why did you bother turning it on in the first place?
…because sometimes good mail ends up in our junkmail folders until we have a chance to fix it.
I’ve logged in fine, but I see no link anywhere on the page that lets me review my junkmail.
Blocked access to Junk Mail is a hinderance because it is necessary to re-filter messages that were snagged as false positives. In order for delivery to occur, especially when pushing to a mobile device, Junk Mail does need to be monitored. I agree with what was already mentioned, this should NOT have been undertaken during regular business hours. Run your ***scheduled*** maintenance when the vast majority of your users are not in the midst of their work day.
That said, this is a service for which you are choosing to pay, and if it is not up to your standards, you have the freedom to shop for a different host. I am bothered by this situation as much as anyone, but I can still log in and am hoping that once the migration is complete, the link for accessing Junk Mail via the mailbox admin panel will appear.
That is…..I hope it does.
It seems to me that if a big change in the email program is going to be made, we should be told first so that we can change the junk mail settings if we want to.
I have them set so they filter out all spam, and new addresses, too. It works well for me because we get a lot of spam. But now I can’t get to the quarenteened email, which I need.
This change could have been done at night and there should have been some easy to understand warning.
The link just takes you to your mailbox manager page, with no option to check junk mail.
we turned it on because otherwise, instead of one or two legit emails getting filtered out a couple times a month, we’d have hundreds – if not thousands – of junk emails littering our inboxes weekly – however, the one or two customers who accidentally get delayed in the junk filter until we access it would be irate if they were not delayed, but inaccessible completely – as they may be right now!!!
I agree – poorly handled on your part, DreamHost. As others have pointed out, if we’d known about this upfront we could have (temporarily) turned off the Junk Mail filter.
Help !
How Do We check our Junk Mail. View IT, Then DELET IT ????
Some things to realize, although I know people will not be scrolling to the end of the comments immediately after angrily reading the explanatory post:
1. The migration from the old Junk Mail system to the new one is not complete yet.
2. The post on which we are all commenting will be updated when said migration is complete.
3. Until the migration is complete, we will likely not be able to access our Junk Mail AT ALL.
4. As I said in #3, with no access to the new Junk Mail in place until after the migration, even logging into the mailbox administration won’t grant access.
5. Wait until DH lets us know the migration is complete. It is all we can do, other than complaining directly to Support and/or cancelling our accounts and moving elsewhere.
Pretty much everything is said here…
1. Amazing this would be done during the middle of a work day
2. No notice
3. A complete disruption in the delivery of ALL email, not just the diversion of junk mail
4. First the notice said done by 1, then done by 3, now not done by 4:20…what a surprise
And here I thought the reason I wasn’t getting email was due to the earthquake.
Hurrah! It is now working. May not be stable as I don’t see a status change above but…give it a try…
Nice timing. Guess no one thought to check a graph of email usage throughout the day.
But thanks for trying to make it better. Hopefully the new system will display “From” addresses more intelligently so when I get an email from a mailing list it doesn’t look like “?ISO8859-1lkjsdflajsbnaoboaiseg” or whatever.
Wait, remind me why I’m not using Gmail to do all my Junk filtering?
I quit my last email server because they changed everything one day without taking adequate steps to enable me to continue viewing and sending my emails. Hey, it happened again! Could it be that all email servers are equally screwed up? This goes a long way to convincing me to change my email to hotmail or any of the others and stop trying to use my own address.
burp
I see nothing different……still no access to Junk Mail at all.
Update?
Ah, there it is…..*pokes around*
I am glad the mail system is giving more control. I want a system that blocks all baned spam and does not just accept it to a junk folder. I wan the crap to bounce so the address will fall out of systems.
I also agree with dave above
“Hopefully the new system will display “From” addresses more intelligently so when I get an email from a mailing list it doesn’t look like “?ISO8859-1lkjsdflajsbnaoboaiseg” or whatever.”
The Spam cop is so time consuming and clunky I quit using it.
Still waiting for my “Move to Inbox and Whitelist” command to process….the appearance of the Junk Mail list keeps changing and it refuses to process my commands. Perhaps we are jumping the gun in proclaiming this completed.
Oh and….the severity of the complete disruption of the entire email server is “Low”??!! I think the priorities of this organization need an overhaul.
Quite frankly this ‘upgrade is taking way too long.
The touted ‘advantages’ are so far vaporware as nothing has been say far as to what they may or may not be.
All my mail system goes to junk until white listed and right now I have no way to know what is going on and how it will work next nor if I will ever get to check the ‘junk’ before it is thrown out.
Interesting that Dreamhost considers the fact that we aren’t able to access email – whether it be junk mail or not – is Low in Severity. As many have pointed out, just because it is “Junk Mail” doesn’t mean that it isn’t important – that is why we have the option to configure it.
YEP THIS LOW CRAP IS MAKING ME MAD! THEY SAID IT WOULD BE DONE BY 1PM NOW ITS ALMOST 9PM AND NOTHING IS WORKING.
Nevermind its working I am dumb
Can’t get in – @dreamhost.com…. How inefficient.
it’s not working for me…when I try to get the quarantined mail, I keep being asked to sign in. very frustrating.
And just when I was happy that my DreamHost email was finalllllllllly working after months and months of system outtages and delays with our email…..
Team DH why do you do things like this without first discussing it with your customers? Doesn’t make sense and now I cannot access my quarantined mail.
GET ME INTO JUNK MAIL NOW SO THAT I CAN CLEAN OUT MY COMPUTER!!!!!
BOB R.
Why can’t I get into the settings? Is my whitemail still there?
Ah, the joy of clicking a link to my new email system and it defaults to NON-SSL,NOT SECURE, IN THE CLEAR TRANSMISSION! Great, already sent my password and now I have change it and keyrings on all my computers. Gee, thanks.
Why does Dreamhost even allow access to webmail and this new mailboxes site over http. This is pathetic, insecure, and so 1999. We’ve seen problems with sending email from dreamhost due to blacklisting and people accidently exposing their credentials for spammers to intercept does not help the case. You know better, safeguard us better and prevent this stupidity.
Could you guys trash squirrelmail while you’re at it too? cuz now it really is completely useless!
yer all going to burn for offering sub-par services soo baad they don’t really work and sooo cheap folk can’t afford not to use them.
No one likes change. I can live with this. Thank you.
Instead of going to mailboxes.dreamhost.com; you can just go to mailboxes.yourdomain.com. Alternatively if you go to the dreamhost one and ignore the @dreamhost.com
In every case ….. mailboxes.dreamhost.com or mailboxes.yourdomain.com appear this message when i click “junkmail” link
“You are being redirected to the new junkmail quarantine.. if you are not redirected in 5 seconds please click here”
and open another identical windows …. i dont see my junkmail
INCREDIBLE CAOS!!!!!!!!!!!!
RESOLVE —–> NO NO NO NO NO
Please use https and a valid cert. please?
I’ve gone round and round and round trying to access junkmail. Same old thing. I log in and select junk mail, it routes me to the new login and there’s still no access to junkmail on the new page.
How can I sort by score in my quarantine list?
This was previously available.
Why am I required to authenticate twice to view my quarantine list?
I.e. one login for web mail, and then a second login for junk mail.
Will we have the option of using the old web UI instead of the (inferior) new UI?
Quarantine and junkmail don’t work from webmail
After logging in twice it takes you back to login again. The other way was better
TO ACCESS YOUR JUNK MAIL, CLICK ON…
Junkmail Quarantine
You currently have 12 messages waiting for you
(example)
Well… nothing I was going to say hasn’t already been said.
This is a really unwieldy junkmail interface. Why not just do the IMAP folder right out of the gate like others have suggested? From the replies, I get the understanding that this is only temporary? I hope so because I can’t see that this is a good permanent solution.
I don’t have a real beef because I’ve been nothing but happy with your service but I do have to chime in along with others in making my unhappiness known about thischange. I have to comb through my junk mail several times a day because I get all kinds of business emails which route there. Logging on twice is kind of a pain. Not an earth shattering pain, but a pain nonetheless.
Looking good.
I like the new tooltip that shows the full Subject. Any way to add the same thing to the From address?
Also any chance of a “refresh this page” link on the JunkMain page?
Thanks.
Well, this is certainly a giant pain in the ass. I’m thinking I’ll just disable the DreamHost junkmail crap and let my mail program handle it all itself from now on.
Is anyone else getting this error when they log onto the junk mail box:
You have changed your password via the unix “passwd” command!
Unfortunately, our database now doesn’t know what it is, and so this page will not be able to log you in.
If you want to use this site, you can reset your password via the main web panel so our database has your password again.
I have to toss in another vote with the folks who point out that having to login a second time to check if something got caught in the junk mail filter is a TOTAL PAIN IN THE ASS. It wasn’t broke, so fix it anyway – “Lets play like we’re Microsoft and screw up the interface just because we can. To hell with the customers!”
My understanding of IMAP access is that a junk folder would process a client filter, not a server filter like SpamAssassin (SpamCop is for reporting, not filtering, spam). I was also surprised by the un-noticed change, and frankly I didn’t like the way it worked before either (yes, it was broke and often dumped things and is lacking in checking features and fine tuning filtering) but I wanted server side spam filtering, for not-so-obvious reasons I have to use a zero tolerance policy and rely on a whitelist instead, and all because (and only with) webmail access… so what’s the fuss? If not liking the server-side filters, don’t use them; use something with a local client instead. Have to use webmail? Stuck with what works with SquirrelMail, which is only SpamAssassin it seems. Dunno if RoundCube has one yet, didn’t like the beta status of a different webmail system, but now that it and others are going to be offered I think I’ll check it out and see if there’s more brought to the table that might be better. If not, maybe the Gmail tie-in is an option; I hear it’s got great filtering and a good interface and nothing will have to change, like my personal domain email addresses (so I hear).
Oh, and btw, I noticed only one of my mailbox accounts retained my custom policy, another was whacked out, maybe because of the new feature of domain-wide policy options, and when I tried to change it I get “Can’t call method “Reserved” on an undefined value at /usr/local/lib/site_perl/Ndn/Mail/Web/Mail.pm line 1417.” Maybe I’ll try with my DH account mailbox login and see if that gives me options to set policy domain-wide, or maybe it’s in the control panel. I don’t have cause to get that deep in admin very often with DH, so each time it’s like Easter Egg hunts! (which I like)
Neato! Just looked and, yup, it’s all in the DH control panel Mail section. Looks like I can manage spam filtering for all accounts on my domains, not just the ones I personally use. That’s cool, cuz it was a pain to try to get the layperson to understand how to set their whitelist, blacklist, and filters so it suits the type of emailing they do, let alone get them to wade thru the SpamAssassin crazy page to check the filtered mail for false positives. Say it like that and they think disease and freak out, don’t want to know, claims of too much information.
And I really hated logging into their accounts as them. They’re all, like, “Oh noes! You can read my email! The horror!”
Let me add my vote here – one PITA that could be fixed in this new “improved” system is to allow sorting the junk mail by score. If I get 300 spams in a day I really shouldn’t have to waste my time eyeballing all 300 to check out low scoring emails.
Gotta agree with the new system being a PITA 
Having to login a *second* time in a frame, scroll down, and click another link is a BIG STEP BACKWARDS in usability. Was that really the ONLY way to implement this? Bleahhh.
Yeah, it seems sorting by score should be implemented, along with a login-pass through. Or at least have the link from within squirrelmail, after you log in, take you directly to the quarantine (rather than the main mailboxes page).
Big step backwards in usability, whatever the reasoning.
Indeed, it used to sort by score I think and it was usually easier to spot false positives by checking the score – tho I’m not certain if it was sorted lowest to highest or if I just got in the habit of looking at the score. Methinks it was sorted, but now it’s by date.
I honestly can’t remember – was it possible to sort the list by either score or date with a click? Both are kinda nice, depending on how long between checks and how much wuz there (I only get about 5 to 20 spams a day).
Oh, and I just tried setting a custom policy to test the one mailbox I mentioned that wouldn’t, and now it and another won’t even let me into the settings panel with a lot of scary code following, “NZA Fatal Error! The developer says: cant load policy. Handy stack trace:…”
My junk mail quarenteen has gone from reporting 50-100 messages a day before the change to just a couple now. Is this working properly? Are the other messages being lost?
The new junkmail quarantine is indeed losing messages. I contacted support — who have been unwilling to investigate the problem so far — and posted to the forum: http://discussion.dreamhost.com/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=forum_troubleshooting&Number=109294&page=0&view=expanded&sb=5&o=186
> I like the new tooltip that shows the full Subject. Any way to add the same thing to the From address?
> Also any chance of a “refresh this page” link on the JunkMain page?
Wahey, both got implemented. Thanks DH =]
And duh I just noticed you can preview the email contents. Awesome.
WTF? I select all the junkmail i want to delete, click “delete”, it says “deleted”, but the junkmail is still there. Have we made old junk mail invincible to deletes?
Hey DH… How about putting a link to my Junk Mail sometime in mailboxes.dreamhost.com. Been 3 weeks now and I STILL can’t review junk mail.
I do not have an address ending in “@dreamhost.com” so my usual login does not work to veiw the junk mail quarantine. This is a needed process to ensure that all Junk is not junk. If there is not a way to return it to the webmail access, I will have to just turn it off. I hate to do this becaue it will overcrowd my inboxes for all our users.
Please let me know the new process, my login and my password, and what I should do until then.
Morris Morrow
Cascio Storage & Warehouse, Inc.