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[dusty_bin]

"It is also probable that we will be making further changes to the mail platform next week to start dropping spam email that is sent directly to the mx last servers."

But wouldn't that also affect those using SMTP for delivery?  I would not want PN to take over spam detection on my account - except if it just remains as an optional facility.

[mr_chris]

No legit email should be sent directly to mxlast, but IIRC, some spammers do it deliberately in order to try and get the email through any spam filters which may not be installed on the last mail exchanger. Not sure how it would affect those using SMTP, presumably if the customers SMTP server was down, then mail would go to autoturn rather than mx last?

Not 100% familiar with this, but that's the way I think it works!

[jelv1]

No legit email should be sent directly to mxlast

Not true (if it was why not just scrap the mxlast servers?  )

If someone tries to send a genuine email to the main servers and cannot for whatever reason it should go down the MX records in priority order which will obviously mean that genuine emails can be sent to mxlast

[bpullen]

John,

I'm aware that legit email gets sent to the mx lasts and AIUI they will still allow this. I'm assuming we have some means of identifying mail that has been purposely sent direct to the mx lasts.

Yesterday I was informed that we'd taken an account with around 200,000 emails in one of its mailboxes. Around 38% of this mail had been sent directly to the mx lasts. All of this was SPAM (and had been marked as such).

We now have 8 mxcores at each datacentre in Sheffield. One site acts as the primary delivery servers whilst the other acts as the mx lasts. If one site dies we can failover to the next so I'm sure all the points raised so far have been factored in.

Needless to say I shall make sure they are all raised prior to implementation never-the-less.

Whilst I'm here it's worth me mentioning that we'll be kicking off the migration to the new platform today. We had to put this on hold last week in light of the recent problems. There's a copy of the Service Status post here.

[bpullen]

OK, I'm going to get started on a relatively detailed post about the proposed changes and post  it across the community so people know what to expect. The change to the mx lasts will see a noticeable decrease in the volume of spam delivered to customers' mailboxes so it will need to be justified in advance.

I've raised the points made so far in this thread. SMTP will not be treated any differently. Mail that ends up at mxlast will be dealt with in the same way it always has been if it is destined to be delivered to a customer running their own mail server.

[bpullen]

Hi all,

As the mail storage migration is now complete as announced here I've taken the decision to unsticky this thread.