downtime
Microsoft’s SNDS (Smart Network Data Services), the reputation portal that provides deliverability feedback for folks sending to Microsoft Outlook.com/Hotmail, appears to be down at the moment. Microsoft has set an “under maintenance” static page in its place, as of my last check at 9:15 am US central time on Wednesday, October 18th.I’ll update this page as I get more information.What is SNDS? Click here to learn more.
Today, Wednesday, October 11th, many senders are reporting trouble (specifically, delayed mail) when attempting to send email to Microsoft-hosted subscribers. Here’s more on the issue from Steve Atkins from Word to the Wise. I’m keeping a close eye on my Office365 admin dashboard to watch for updates on this issue. Microsoft has logged this as “incident EX680695” and those with O365 admin access can go to Home -> Health -> Exchange Online -> Health to see the current status and click on the incident/advisories there to find the latest details. Here’s a direct link to that incident information, which likely only works if you have appropriate access.Many (but not all) senders were impacted, seeing “451 4.7.500 Server busy” delivery delays when sending to email domains hosted by Office 365 / Exchange Online. Many of the senders reporting trouble were located in the EU; suggesting that the issue may be EU-specific, or specific
Microsoft’s SNDS (Smart Network Data Service) reputation feedback portal is having trouble at the moment. For at least the past week, people have been reporting that attempts to register and verify new IP addresses or ranges with SNDS are failing, because the verification email is not being sent by Microsoft. A few folks have mentioned discussing the issue with Microsoft, and being told to try again — and have done so, to no avail.At first I was assuming that Microsoft’s SNDS verification request emails were bouncing off of various folks’ spam filters. But in my testing, I don’t even see any attempt by Microsoft to connect to and deliver a message to my IP range’s verification address at my self-hosted email domain. So, something is definitely and significantly broken — I’ve got no proof that the SNDS system is even attempting to send verification messages.Thus, at this time, I don’t
Multiple folks have reported via multiple forums today (May 22nd) that Yahoo’s ISP Feedback Loop (called the “Complaint Feedback Loop/CFL”) may not be working properly at the moment. People are reporting either no volume at all for the past few days or greatly reduced volume of spam complaint reports. I am reliably informed that Yahoo is aware of the issue and is working on fixing things. I’ll update this post when I have more information.
Looks like GPT is down again — it’s not just you. The user interface for Google Postmaster Tools is showing a spinning wheel and nothing else, as of 9:00 am US central time on Friday, March 3rd. When this happened last time, the API remained up (so if you pull GPT data into a third party tool you are possibly unaffected) and when GPT returned, no data seemed to be lost. Hang in there — I’m sure folks at Google are aware and working on the issue.
Mashable’s Tim Marcin and others are reporting that a failure in Microsoft’s spam filtering has resulted in Outlook.com (Hotmail) users receiving a bunch of spam in their inbox unexpectedly. Meaning, something broke — a something that would have previously either blocked those messages or relegated them to the Junk Folder.I wasn’t able to confirm this myself; my personal and test Outlook.com addresses are too well protected from public view; meaning they’re not on any common spam lists. I’ve updated my website contact info to use an outlook.com account, so I’m sure I’ll start getting spam there soon. Maybe I’ll be able to observe this for myself. (Hey, that’s aliversonchicago@outlook.com, for all the spambots out there.)This could be causing a unique scenario or two. Not only are bad guys perhaps scrambling to send as much garbage as they can before the spam filter loophole is corrected, but for email sending platforms
From 17:00 GMT on Feb 16th through 09:50 GMT on February 17th, spam filterer/security service Spamhaus suffered an outage that meant that “data included in the Data Query Service, Rsync, Spamhaus Intelligence API, and Border Gateway Protocol Firewall was not refreshed between these times.”The way most Spamhaus data is shared with the world allows for quite a bit of redundancy and resilience against downtime, in that DNS queries can be cached, DNS zones are handed out to and stored by different remote DNS servers. Meaning that while some of Spamhaus core systems may have been offline during this time, spam filtering continued unabated. They’re saying that their ability to make any updates (additions or removals) was effectively blocked during the downtime, meaning anybody waiting for removal from a Spamhaus list probably had to wait a bit longer for a response than usual. And also, perhaps spam filtering effectiveness was down
Google Postmaster Tools, the very handy domain reputation dashboard provided free of charge from the folks behind Gmail, is having trouble right now. Since at least early afternoon on Thursday, February 9th, users have been greeted with an eternal spinning wheel after logging in. A few folks have suggested that hitting refresh a bunch of times might get you past this, but I wasn’t able to have any luck with that myself. Thus, if you’re experiencing trouble with GPT at the moment, know that it’s not just you, and I’m sure Google is working on getting everything back up and running as soon as possible.
Multiple folks are warning that internet security company Cyren is on the verge of shutting down. The company itself has not exactly said this, but reading between the lines, it seems inevitable; just about all staff laid off, and smart industry folks warning that while servers are up for now, if something were to break, there’s probably nobody left on the payroll to fix it. Cyren is broadly used for spam/content filtering and if your company or mailbox provider utilizes Cyren for inbound spam/security filtering of email, they’re probably scrambling to find an alternate solution. Indeed, one mailbox provider I’ve talked to today is in this exact position, seeing how quickly they can migrate away from the use of Cyren services. Threat intelligence and spam filtering requires that filter rules and fingerprints be updated automatically and periodically, both to capture new threats and address potential false positives. Assuming that there’s nobody
Italiaonline/Libero Mail is having inbound email issues, impeding attempts to send mail to the domains libero.it, virgilio.it, inwind.it, iol.it and blu.it. Senders are reporting various 4xx SMTP delays and timeouts when attempting to connect. Either small amounts of mail or no amounts of mail are getting through currently (it’s not clear to me which). This appears to have been ongoing since Sunday evening, local time. Italiaonline is aware of the issue and is working to resolve it, reporting here that “We have been working tirelessly for several hours now to solve an unexpected and unforeseen infrastructural problem.”You can follow them on Facebook here, if you’d like to watch for updates.