Nearly There
The mail server transition is mostly complete now except that quite a few users with old outgoing mailserver settings of unencrypted port 587 (and port 25) still can’t send out email. I’ve managed to talk many dozens of users through changing to outgoing mailserver port 465 with SSL but that does not fix the underlying issue or help those who still cannot send out mail. The only solution at the moment (Sat 27th) is to either use webmail or change your outgoing port to 465 with SSL.
In some respects I am reluctant to fix the unencrypted port 587 and 25 issue because no one should be receiving or sending out mail via an unencrypted connection these days. It’s just a leftover legacy of how Spiderweb used to allow email users to connect to the old server. If I had to delay this server transition to make sure everyone had changed their incoming and outgoing mailserver settings to a secure SSL connection before the transition then it would never have happened and the old mailserver software could have failed. There have not been any updates or security patches for the mailserver software on the old server for the last 3 years so if it did fail for some reason then any outage could have been much much worse than the current one.
In fact the hard drives on the old server (aside from the mailserver software itself) had failed and was replaced a few months ago and even that new hard drive replacement was showing signs of file system corruption.
It’s Time
… as Gough Whitlam once said.
The new mailserver has oodles of ram and brand new SSD drives so I am confident it will last for many years to come. The new mailserver software system itself is also industry standard (for linux based servers) and is well maintained upstream by the relevant software developers. One of the nice features is that the spam filtering system only requires moving messages in and out of the Junk folder to activate the spam retraining feature. No extra IsGood and IsSpam folders needed anymore. This mailserver also supports “sieve” scripts for advanced mail delivery but it will take me a while to test that advanced functionality out.
I’ll try to find the time to keep posting articles about any server updates and hints about how to take advantage of the new mailserver and perhaps some introductory tutorials about how to use the Elementor page builder for WordPress too. If anyone else would like to write an article then feel free to email the contents to admin@spiderweb.com.au and attach any related photos.
Again, apologies for any downtime and frustration caused by the recent mailserver transition. We will do the best we can to help everyone back to normality and sending off emails again.