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"Freeola Email Service"

Morning all.

I appreciate people will be busy this morning but it someone could provide a likely ETA for normal service it would be much appreciated - either on the Status page or here?

Thanks in advance.
NB. twitter.com/Freeola would work well for Service updates and if the outage was affecting your website you could still reach the world :¬)
[s]Hmmm...[/s]

Hi ourLOL,
Not sure why your emails go back to far - my oldest was the 5th October.

Are you happy your email client isn't setup to 'leave a copy on the server' after picking up your email as this would explain why you had so much repeated?
i.e. Copies of your emails would have still been on the Freeola server so would have been regenerated.

EDIT: Eccles has posted while I was writing - it does sound as if you need to check your email setings.

FWIW - Working my way through my emails this morning I can't see any that haven't arrived previously!?!
[s]Hmmm...[/s]

Regard receiving e-mails older than the outage. If you are having this problem then this is because you haven't set up you mail client(s) to download and remove the mail from the server when checking your inbox. While this is perfectly acceptable it's not really the what POP3 was designed to do. Once the e-mail is downloaded it should be removed from the server and so not retrievable by another machine. This is one of the reasons IMAP is an option offered by some mail servers.

Digi: Is the spam you have received dated within the last few days? You may have to check the mail headers for the correct date as you e-mail client may treat it as new mail and date it recently even if it existed on the server 90 days ago.

Hmmm... Not quite sure duplicate e-mail will be coming through. Its possible the MX server that received the email passed it onto the POP server but the server didn't respond so the mail wasn't cleared off the MX even though the old server had stored it. When the new server came online the MX may still had the mail but I'd expect it to come through earlier.

As I say I've had 'every' single email that was sent to my inbox from 8th October appears to have been replicated. It is not just those that should have come through during the server failure. In my case just over 1700 messages.

Many of my messages received had already been filed into relevant sub-folders. As you can imagine it is a nightmare trying to sort it all out now. Basically I'm deleting junk, newsletters, stuff I wasn't interested in anyway (stuff previously deleted)... then filing everything else away for a second time. From there I'm having to open these sub-folders and delete all the duplicates. It is a rather painful exercise and is taking forever.

Sent messages don't appear to be affected.

I think some larger businesses may struggle a bit if faced with the same issues I've encountered this morning.

Laura

Morning,
Just to add to what others are seeing.

I'm also seeing duplicate emails for the days after the 'crash' which is rather confusing as I thought these would only have made it to the new server?

i.e. Messages written on Friday have arrived again?
[s]Hmmm...[/s]

I agree many old messages are arriving this morning - I think this problem has been an issue for longer than the actual breakdown of the server, I was down south last week and had to phone freeola support because I was getting a blockage on my incomming mail, when I called they cleared what they thought was the offending email, but I have a hunch that this was the server starting to blow up. On another note I notice I have so much spam and why offer a 32 inch p''''s enlargement now when it cant be delivered in time for Xmas!


Digi

Older email are definitely filtering through this morning... all 1713 messages!

This is not a moan and I do realise it can't be helped, but it looks like every email received from the last 90 days has been restored... rather than just those during the outtage. Given that I normally file my emails into sub-folders its going to take a little time now to sort it out again, delete etc.

For those of you working for third party companies, overseeing websites for others, you might want to make a note of this. There is the potential, I suppose, that the same thing could could happen and your clients will find themselves overwhelmed with emails when they go into work on Monday.

Now if only it could have been 1713 new orders!

Have a great weekend.

Laura

Yes that's correct. Older e-mail should be filtering through now as the data is pulled off the old server. Still a bit tricky to given a time of completion I'm afraid.

Just to let you know Hmmm and Eccles, getting a lot of emails tonight dated 8th Dec - looks as if things are beginning to clear in the backlog :-)

Thanks for the update.

I'm just trying to clarify what 'Tony' said in his post regarding updating the Status page re. 'Lost email'.

The Status page is the first port of call for most people so it's important the information there is current and in step with what's been posted here.

Thanks again.
[s]Hmmm...[/s]

An effort to get any recoverable emails off the broken server is going to continue over the weekend. It may mean that all emails have to be retrieved first and then put onto the new server all at once. That's a lot of email.

As this was an unexpected outage we cannot guarantee that email has or hasn't been lost.
In fact during the normal operation of the email service we can't guarantee the occasional message will be lost, that's the nature of email I'm afraid.

Sorry for the wait but we are doing our best for you all.