Mail problems: when are they going to be solved?

Lately there are too many problems with the email service. On January you took measures to have "100% uptime" regarding email which was not the case

Although I understand this is not your fault (according to your explanations) I think you should solve these issues quickly and for good (if possible). I am receiving too many complaints about the service. Email is something most people rely on and they can have legal problems if they don't answer some communications on a timely manner. I have some customers from the government of my country and they are getting upset and my reputation is suffering

I have some suggestions:

1. Tackle one problem at a time:
You must solve the email problem first instead of opening a brand new ticket system that it's causing us so many problems. Now we don't only have problems with the email but also we cannot rely on the ticket system. I could not see my past tickets, and even if I open a new one it is shown nowhere

2. Don't rush to make changes!!
This is plausible with the ticket system. It has not been working ok. It seems that you don't test anything before doing a change or test too briefly. It was the same with the redundant email server where you told us that there were going to be "no problems or interruptions" which was not the case. I understand that problems can arise anyway but in order to minimize that you should not make these changes during the week, or in the morning. Do them on weekends and let your resellers know **in advance** (e.g., the new ticket system was suddenly implemented and I did not know anything about it)

It was the same with some patches for HSPHERE. You told us that you accept some features from PSoft just because your competitors do the same (I think HPSHERE 2.4, but not very sure). This is a very poor reason. See if your competitos have problems with the new patches, and then wait until the changes are stable

3. Improve communications with your resellers
I cannot monitor the forums 24x7. Why don't you mass email your resellers as soon as you notice a problem? Lately my customers and not you are letting me know about the problem and that does not make me happy

These are suggestions. Don't answer angrily but try to understand that my concerns are valid

Thanks

Suggestions noted.

The mail servers have been doing a fine job although in the last few weeks, there have been 1 or 2 brief outages.

We are on top of them and let me assure you that they are going to be solved.

As far a redundancy with the mail system, there is redudancy. We have a hot-backup mail server that we can use incase of a system crash and we have a relay server to deal with lost email. But the recent issues were with mail server connectivity.

A thorough review is going to be carried out and we'll be doing whatever is required to stop any future issues.

The recent issue seems to have been purely because of the firewall on the server. The firewall was reset but for some reason the entire connectivity of the server was lost. Thankfully we have very responsive staff at the NOC and the issue taken care of quickly. However, we are looking into it

agree with most of the above.

its just a pity. after last weeks issue, Yash tried to say that i dont need to be looking into Dedicated, cos the mail server will be at 100%. we all know that these things happen, but dont promise 100%, and dont be surprised when the resellers and their customers start looking elsewhere.

PS - we also seem to b having the wierd time issue again, like last week. i have emails coming in that are dated in the future by a few hours.
pls look into this.

Well, let me state that every single issue on the mail server in the last few weeks has been been unrelated. I am quite disturbed over the fact.

We are a professionally run company and steps are being taken to prevent these brief outages from occuring again.

That's all i can say. As a customer, you are free to look anywhere for good services but let me tell you that we have alot of customers that switch to us every week for better network, email or web reliability.

When I say these issues are going to go away, rest assured that I am doing alot right now. I am probably much more frustrated that any of you and these things hurt our business probably more than anyone else so its not that such things are being taken lightly

We are processing about 50 to 60 tickets a day, higher than we were with the Hsphere ticket system so i really dont understand whats so confusing about it.

The ticket system was not any drastic change. I don't undertsand the fuss behind submitting tickets to a different system. And it was tested substantially FYI

Yes, we have introduced mail redundancy systems but really the network issues we've had, the redundancy cannot prevent them. The redundancy is at the server level, if we have corrupt config files again or QMAIl issues, we wont waste anytime in bringing up a hot-standby

But all these issues have been network, nothing to do with the mail server

snooper said:

PS - we also seem to b having the wierd time issue again, like last week. i have emails coming in that are dated in the future by a few hours.
pls look into this.

Click to expand...

That issue was resolved almost immediately. The clock was set 2 hours ahead and we corrected that right away.

The mail outage was for 45 minutes according to SiteUptime. There was a mail relay server running to capture any lost email during this period which has been piped back into the primary mail server.

I appologize for stating 20 minutes initially. I was informed about the issue only after it was resolved by the linux team.

I'd also like to add that today, we had a new linux administrator join our team. This guy has 7 years of solid experience and is an excellent linux programmer as well.

Both tanmaya and Guru (the new admin) are scheduled to take a thorough look at these recent issues in less than 10 hours from now.

For the record, there have been 2 brief outages this month, and 2 brief outages last month. That makes a total of 4 outages in 8 weeks. I agree that is totally unacceptable but I won't term these as excessive as being portrayed here at the forum.

I hope there is no objection if I close this thread now.

There are two things I do not like about the new system.

The first is the delay between the time you submit a ticket and the time you see it in your list; with the old system, we could see it immediately, but when I submitted a ticket this morning it took 15-20 minutes to show up in my ticket list. This was my first submission with the new system, so I'm not sure if this is the norm.

The second isn't as big and is something that can probably be fixed. After submitting my ticket, I was trying to view my tickets to make sure it had been submitted. I clicked on "Ticket History" thinking that would take me to a list of tickets I had submitted, but instead it linked me to the old hsphere control panel. Okay, so I figured that link was for "tickets on the old system," but I couldn't access that list, either, because it just kept giving me the address for the new ticket system.

I finally found my current ticket list on the "Open Ticket" link, but this is unintuitive (I would expect that link to take me directly to a ticket creation page). Can either (a) the "Open Ticket" link be called "Ticket Management" or something and "Ticket History" be fixed so that you can actually access your old tickets on the old system, or (b) have "Open Ticket" go straight to a ticket creation page and "Ticket History" list tickets you have entered previously (on this system)?

The ticket would appear immediately. The delay could have been due to the mail outage. It appears immediately for us at least.

You can also email our support addresses if you have problems. I'll look into the interface concerns.

But honestly, the advantage of the system is more on our end than for customers. Cerberus is an enterprise level support system and it is helping is streamline support dramtically here at Jodohost. We can see everything from the average responsive time to how effective each staff member is in answering tickets.

More importantly, we can't miss tickets in this system. The queue is so well designed and organisation in so good that we are able to keep the number of unanswered tickets at any given time to 2 or 3.

Please open another thread for the support center issues.