Something went wrong at my generally extremely excellent Web hosts securewebs.com, and the Dan's Data mail server has gone a bit strange.
For the better part of a day, now, I think mail.dansdata.com has been eating messages and sending neither errors to the senders nor the actual mail to me.
I'm waiting for feedback from SecureWebs support about this. They're generally pretty snappy (so, in case you're wondering, are Blogsome), but it's the weekend and SecureWebs are the kind of hosting outfit that doesn't make stupid claims about Eight Nines Uptime and charge accordingly. If you buy SecureWebs hosting, you get as much reliability as the vast majority of Web sites need, for a decent price. If you're not a PHB, you'll know that this is very probably what you actually need from a host. Advertisement concludes.
[UPDATE: The support people got back to me about ten minutes after I finished this post.]
The mail server problem may have something to do with my Mirror Universe career as a spammer, or it may not. For a little while just now I thought the server was back, but perhaps it isn't; it's gone quiet again, happily telling me that no messages are waiting when I know that a couple of thousand spams, at the very least, should have piled up by now.
The problem will, I'm sure, be dealt with soon. But if you sent me an important e-mail in the last day, I fear your missive may have been consumed by the rugose and squamous horrors of the bit bucket.
I'll update this post when the server's resuscitated. When that happens, please send your message again. If it's a matter of life, death or PayPal donations, you may e-mail me at rutterd@iinet.net.au and/or rutterd@optushome.com.au.
UPDATE: Mail.dansdata.com has been migrated to a new server, but almost no mail is coming through as of yet. I presume this has to do with DNS propagation or something. I still don't quite trust it, but it looks as if it ought to be working, with I think better spam filtering, soon.
3 August 2008 at 6:09 am
You should probably captcha those addresses, no? No reason to make spam any easier.. This is a good option for quick blog posts.
3 August 2008 at 9:20 am
Eh, I think just breaking the @ to (at) is usually sufficient.
3 August 2008 at 11:49 am
Honestly, I think the average spammer is capable of extending their regexes to include (at) as an alternative to @.