We’ve identified a fault on one of the mail servers. The system is currently stable, but does need attention at the earliest opportunity. We’ve scheduled tomorrow (Friday) from 3PM-5PM to do this work. During that time, Squirrelmail will be completely unavailable.
Please NOTE: You will NOT lose any incoming email, and IMAP access to mail eg, from Blackberry’s will not be affected.
For any of the techies interested in what happened on Friday:
I visited the failed server today, and oddly enough found it powered up. It was completely dead though, and a forced power cycle was required. Oddly, the machine is now taking over 5 minutes to do it’s power on self test, so that warrants some further investigation. As I also found a certain module not loading properly, we’ve upgraded the system to the latest Kernel, and the system seems to be happier now, we will keep an eye on it.
One of our mail relays has suffered an outage. Looks like complete power failure to the unit, as we cannot get onto it’s out-of-band management unit either. Squirrelmail users should be unaffected as we have re-routed the traffic through a backup server. For users who use our relay service (this is a handful of schools running their own SMTP servers), you will not be able to send mail but you will be able to receive mail. I am in the process now of firing up a virtual server instance of the relay in place of the downed unit, on the same IP. I hope to have service restored within an hour. These things always happen on Friday evenings don’t they….?
Blackberry access is unofficially available on MEWAN at this time. No client support for Blackberry client is provided by MEWAN, however we have several users successfully connecting to the MEWAN mail server over IMAP using their Blackberry. To connect Blackberry to your MEWAN email, the following settings are required:
PLEASE NOTE: Address Books and Signatures are specific to Squirrelmail and are not available over a Blackberry IMAP connection.
Webmail is great – access from anywhere to everyone’s favourite app – email! The venerable Squirrelmail is certainly solid, and it is rather configurable. It would be fair to say it was a little “clunky” though. We’ve been taking a look at the rather nifty Roundcube webmail application, and have set it up to work with our mail platform. It’s not quite as configurable as Squirrelmail, but you may find it more comfortable to use – particularly as it supports “drag and drop” of emails between your folders. NOTE: This is just a test; we provide no support for this client yet – Squirrelmail is the supported platform.
Feel free to try it out, you may continue to use Squirrelmail also, it is not an either/or choice. Access to your mail via roundcube is available at school or on the world wide web at
NOTE: You must login with your full email address as your username.
We are approaching full storage capacity on our E-Mail Platform and need to perform some maintenance work to add the final chunk of space remaining on the system. The downtime should last no more than an hour, and is a temporary measure, providing an estimated additional 3 months of storage. A further upgrade will then be required as we implement a much larger storage server, projected to provide capacity till around 2012.
Remember, you can always help at any time by removing any unwanted old emails.
