downtime

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.

Multiple folks are reporting Gmail delivery issues today — both “571” style spam bounce blocks and spam folder placement. Some of the affected folks seem to be sending corporate mail, outbound from Proofpoint or Microsoft O365 hosted environments. It happens to some folks from time to time, but there are enough reports of it out in the wild that I think that perhaps Google released a significant Gmail filter update within the past 1-3 days and that it might be a bit buggy. It already sounds like some of those same folks are now seeing improvement. If you’re affected, be sure to submit sample messages via the Gmail Sender Contact Form — though they do not always respond, they do review every ticket, and in a scenario like this, sending them data and feedback is important. (Click here to learn more about that sender form process.)Of course, you need to

Google and various news outlets are reporting that Gmail had a significant outage today (Saturday, December 10th). Google reports that as of 4:16 PM UTC (10:16 AM US central time) things are on the mend, but that there’s a backlog of messages to be delivered.I can’t tell if senders found inbound delivery attempts delayed with 4xx errors, or if Google servers accepted messages then sat on them. Message delivery to the inbox, however, was definitely delayed for folks (observed by myself, too), regardless of what the backend systems were doing.

Multiple folks over on the Mailop list are reporting that Microsoft OLC (Outlook.com/Hotmail/etc)’s IPv6 inbound mail servers are deferring inbound mail delivery attempts with “451 4.7.500 Server busy. Please try again later” errors. The fix seems to be to stop trying to send it over IPv6 and send the mail to any IPv4 MX record instead, and then your queues will drain successfully.What domains are affected? Likely all domains I’ve listed here as handled by Microsoft, and only if you send over IPv6, and only if the recipient domain is a Microsoft-hosted domain that has an MX record with a hostname that maps to an IPv6 address.If you’re sending mail using an ESP or CRM platform, you’re probably not affected by this. Big mail sending platforms, especially US-based ones, almost exclusively use IPv4 IP addresses, not IPv6.Why is this affecting mail over IPv6 only? Nothing has been confirmed, but I

Ohio broadband provider Buckeye Broadband is reporting that its bex.net email service is offline. If you’re a sender, I recommend pausing all sends to bex.net (and any other domains pointing at mx*.buckeyecom.net, if possible) until you see an all clear message from the ISP posted here.Toledo’s 13ABC Action News reports that the issue is due to a ransomware attack.