C O V I S P . N E T

Due to the large size of some of the spam and junk folders, spam-tagged mail was not getting deleted every 7 days at it was supposed to. This has been corrected. Any Mail in the Spam folder will be deleted after 7 days. Any mail in the Junk folder should be deleted after 7 days as well. Mail in the NotJunk folder will be trained overnight and moved to the Inbox (so the NotJunk mailbox, if it exists, should be empty every morning).

We will monitor this volume of mail and may reduce the time on both these folders to 3 days, depending on the volume we see.

Covisp.net employs a fairly aggressive SpamAssasin profile that does a reasonably good job of marking messages as spam. More than 90% of the mail received by our mailserver is tagged as spam, most of it before it ever reaches a user mailbox. The mail that does reach you and we suspect is spam is deposited in a mailbox named SPAM. We never delete any message after it’s been delivered before you have a chance to see it. We do delete messages marked as spam after 7 days.

There are many emails that do not get tagged properly, especially emails that are almost completely text and are pretending to be prize notifications or the like.

There is something you can do to help, and that is tag these messages as junk in your mail client and put them into a mailbox named “Junk” that is stored on the server. This is very easy to do, any message that you want to be considered as spam should be moved to a mailbox named “Junk”. This mailbox will be processed and any messages in it will be learned as spam, which should help prevent similar messages from being missed in the future. If you are having any trouble, email us and we’ll create the Junk mailbox for you. If you use OS X’s Mail program, you can set it to move messages to the Junk folder, just make sure that Junk folder is stored on the server.

Please be careful with this. Do not put mail you asked for but no longer want into the Junk mailbox. That mail should be unsubscribed to or simply deleted. The only mail that should go into Junk is mail that is unsolicited spam that you never requested. If you are unsure if a message is spam or not, you should not put it in the Junk mailbox.

In the unlikely event that you have mail that ends up in your SPAM mailbox and is not actually spam, that mail should be copied to a mailbox named NotJunk (case matters, capital N, capital J) and it will be processed as not spam and then moved to your INBOX after it’s been processed.

You never need  to empty your Junk, NotJunk, or SPAM mailboxes. They are emptied automatically.

Another thing you can do to make this system work better is to limit the size of your INBOX. Messages should be sorted into folders if they are going to be kept for more than a few days or weeks, especially if you get hundreds of emails. Leaving thousands or tens of thousands of emails in you INBOX simply makes everything slower for you. Even creating a “2010″ folder and a “2011″ folder and sorting all the mail from those years into those will help speed up your mail access and, most importantly, you spam tagging. You do not need to delete any email you want to keep, and you can store mail in folders on your own computer or on the server, but you should not store all your email in your inbox.

And yes, before anyone asks, there are users with tens of thousands of emails in their inbox.

Servers were offline this morning from approximately 0400-0415 MST while some updates were made to the DNS entries.

The email system was offline intermittently Saturday from noon until about 1800 MST (6pm) while some maintenance was done. The drive holding all the system backups died, and will need to be replace. All backups are still proceeding to our off-site backup. No data was lost, although some mail during that period may have inadvertently bounced.

Web sites were not affected.

There was an extended power outage in the early morning hours this morning which depleted one of our backup power supplies and killed it. Once power was restored, the UPS lacked the charge to bring the server and router back online.

The servers are both up now. The failed UPS will be replaced, necessitating a few minutes when the servers will be offline.

This post will be updated.