Exim on Nicole server down

[Matt]

Well at this point no one including cPanel knows what the problem is and at the moment they are being unresponsive. I think what we will end up doing is migrating the sites to another server late this evening and then once the sites are on the new server they will start receiving mail again.

We will try to get anything that is in the queue on the dead mail server redirected to the new machine but we have no way of telling how much email was returned to sender and how much is in the queue.

We will do everything possible for your users.

[Matt]

Alright I looked in the mail queue and everything that was in there has been delivered to everybody's inbox. What is happening now is for any new email your mail server is telling the sender to try back later, and that there is a local problem.

This is good because the email will be retried from the sender mail servers until this mail server is available to accept delivery again.

Similar to real life if you are not there to sign for a package the courier will try back later to get your signature when you are available. Or if there was a snowstorm somewhere that delayed the postmaster, he will try back when he can get through...Maybe that will help you explain to your users how it will work.

[integraideas]

Matt,
right now I'm in touch with one customer and he says that there is no return email to the senders. I just test it using a hotmail accout and look the email was delivery.

Test it yourself to see this is no happen.

[Matt]

It wont be returned to sender until their redelivery attempts fail. Typically most systems do not notify you each time they try to redeliver the same email. It would get very annoying if they did so.

Most systems will try to redeliver email for anywhere from 2-7 days before they give up and THEN they will return the mail to sender....

They will try to redeliver anywhere from every 30 minutes to several hours depending on that particular ISP's retry settings, up until several days later when they finally give up and return the mail to sender.

[sergey]

The mail issue has been fixed on the Nicole server and the outgoing mail server is functioning properly on it.

Thanks for your patience and understand regarding this trouble.

[webintrigue]

Alright I looked in the mail queue and everything that was in there has been delivered to everybody's inbox. What is happening now is for any new email your mail server is telling the sender to try back later, and that there is a local problem.

Matt, just verifying something. I tried checking email and there is still nothing from all day. Does this mean that I do have mail still but it just hasn't been sent out or is the mail "lost"? The mail queue you are referring too, is it just for one account or everyone that was hosted on Nicole server account?

Thanks for checking it out.

[Matt]

If you email yourself right now it should be delivered instantly.

The emails that were sent to you today from other ISPs will start to come in starting anytime from now until probably tomorrow sometime, based on how often the other ISP's mailserver is configured to retry delivery of the emails that they queued for later delivery. The other ISP's queued the email they were trying to deliver to Nicole, based on the response that Nicole was telling those ISPs earlier, which was essentially:

"There is a problem with this machine, try to deliver your email again later."

Every ISP has a different idea of what "later" AKA "Retry" is so it will all begin pouring in soon and over the next few hours, everything that was floating around out there will be delivered.

[integraideas]

Excelent Job Matt and team.

Save this experiencie as a "lesson learned" in order to make some preventive actions for this server and the others.

Antonio

[Christopher]

has the smtp server on port 26 set-up so that I can send email from different locations?

[GlowAlex]

Yes, you can use port 26 to send email if your ISP blocks port 25 for some reason.