We now offer Sieve e-mail filtering software on our mail servers. Sieve allows you to process incoming e-mail when it arrives in your Inbox on our server. This is great for anyone who uses a mail program (such as an iPhone) that doesn’t have its own filtering capabilities, or anyone who runs multiple mail programs and doesn’t like having duplicate copies of their filters. It’s also very useful because Sieve filters always run immediately on our server, rather than requiring your mail program to be always running.
If you are happy with the filtering rules available in your mail program (such as Thunderbird, Outlook, or Webmail), then you probably don’t need to use Sieve.
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One of the positive developments on the Internet over the last few years has been increased encryption of e-mail. The Internet is a hostile environment; sometimes your data goes through the servers and routers of companies you’ve never even heard of, or of governments you’ve heard of but don’t like. It makes sense to encrypt e-mail whenever possible.
We’ve supported encryption between our customers and our e-mail servers for a long time, protecting you from eavesdropping “hackers” when you use a WiFi connection at an Internet cafe, for example. But like most companies, we didn’t try encrypting outgoing e-mail after it left our servers or encrypting incoming e-mail from other servers. Although technical standards for doing that exist, they’re relatively new in Internet terms, and our original testing indicated it could cause problems with mail delivery due to many misconfigured servers on the Internet.
That’s changed: More recent testing indicates that it’s much more reliable, and other large companies like Gmail are starting to use it. Because of that, we now use strong TLS (SSL) encryption for inbound and outbound SMTP mail connections (“MX” mail delivery) wherever possible.
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If you use Microsoft Outlook 2007 to read mail and you installed the December 2010 Outlook update, you might find that Outlook is slow to respond when you click between folders. Sometimes it can take several seconds.
This is caused by a bug in the Outlook update, not by a problem on our servers. To fix this, Microsoft recommends uninstalling the update for now.
Between 3:29 PM Pacific time and 3:33 PM Pacific time, our monitoring systems detected that most Internet users could not connect to our primary data center. E-mail delivery was properly queued up and delayed during this period.
We will follow up with the data center team, but the problem appears to have been resolved, and all services are operating normally. We’re continuing to monitor it closely, and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this caused our customers.
Updated: connectivity was lost for four minutes because the data center was fighting off a severe DoS attack.
