mail.de.opalstack.com down

houdinihound

kylotan Right... I see your point. Sean said last backup was just under 24 hours and this problem has been going on for about 9 hours so possibly up to 15 hours of lost email for some clients.

houdinihound

sean I think @"kylotan is referring to IMAP clients that, on connecting and seeing an empty mailbox, will now clear out all the email stored locally as well (until it is restored in a few days time).

edit: sorry, just saw kylotan's post above explaining about Thunderbird and iOS clients.

ttavoy

I'm worried what will happen if my Thunderbird (using IMAP) connects to my mailbox on the server and finds the folders there empty: will Thunderbird delete everything locally?

kylotan

ttavoy Yes, it will.

wearedementors

kylotan Shit happens... I understand the situation and I think it is the best solution out of all the bad solutions available...

Once the backups have been recovered, I suppose that if the old server goes up they will be able to think about recovering the lost emails between the backup and the service outage.

sean

kylotan thanks for the clarification, I agree that's not ideal but we have far more customers who were letting us know that they needed to send and receive email via Opalstack's mail system now so that's what we've done.

kylotan I don't mean the ones that came in during the outage. I mean the ones that came in between the last backup and the outage. They're not going to get restored.

Rest assured that we're going to do everything possible to recover the mail that came in after the most recent backup.

kylotan

sean we have far more customers who were letting us know that they needed to send and receive email via Opalstack's mail system now so that's what we've done

A safer solution might have been to create new mailboxes for these people, so that they could make a small adjustment in their client and get back to work.

Instead you've thrown customers like myself under the bus to get the others up and running quicker, because apparently nobody understood that some of us would be worse off after this decision and would lose access to important and equally time-critical data.

I'm really disappointed at how this whole event has been handled.

sean

kylotan if there is a particular mailbox that you need urgently restored then please email support and we'll do our best to get it restored ASAP.

pecus

I hate to add noise while the team is engaged in the recovery process but I agree that while the goal of restoring as soon as possible email availability is understandable, the loss (and we really hope it is only temporary) of every IMAP mailbox on Opalstack is severe and source of frustration (at least) and of major business and personal life setbacks.

That said (noise, but I think every customer voice has a reason to be heard), yesterday (march 31st) was World Backup Day. Oh the irony of it (I'm going back to grieve over Gbs of lost emails)

bladudflies

Hello -- is there a lag between mailboxes being restored from the backup, and access to webmail? My mailbox (info@bladudflies.com) has been restored from backup (verified on my phone). However, I am unable to access webmail. I'd like to access webmail to assess any lost emails before opening my mail client on my computer. Thanks! Michael

sean

bladudflies there might be a few minutes following a restore before the home directory permissions are fixed. If you're still not able to log in to webmail then please contact support for assistance.

ttavoy thanks for the feedback (you too, @kylotan) - we'll keep all of this in mind if we're ever in this situation again, but we're hoping we won't be 🙂

We're increasingly optimistic that there will be little-to-no data loss when the restore is complete.

ttavoy

If I'm understanding things correctly .........

When Opalstack deployed a new DE IMAP server with empty mailboxes, would it have been a good idea if they had at the same time re-set the mailbox passwords?

All affected people would then be put to the bother of re-re-setting (or un-re-setting) their passwords;

but the subset of people who have "always on" IMAP Thunderbirds would have had the possibility, before re-connecting, of saving some emails which are now permanently lost.

These would be emails which arrived after the last Opalstack backup and before the last IMAP sync of their Thunderbird.

For such people, the only unavoidably lost emails would be the hopefully quite small number which arrived after their last IMAP sync and before the onset of the outage caused emails to start being held for later delivery.

JardeRich

I'm a complete novice so please don't shoot me down in flames.
I assume it's possible to backup mail folders to a computer hard drive or storage device, to mitigate the situation we're all experiencing currently?
How would you go about that?
I'm using Outlook on a PC, in case that's important.

Keep the faith Sean - this will all be over in a day or so.

Thanks

sean

JardeRich instructions for backing up mail in Outlook are available at: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/back-up-your-email-e5845b0b-1aeb-424f-924c-aa1c33b18833

Hope this helps 🙂

heymrdj

sean
Does this work even with IMAP?

One of my clients is convinced he wants to return to Pop3 (given this lastest happening) I'm trying to persuade him that IMAP remains the best solution...

*Be interested in your thoughts on backup and Pop v Imap

I'm sure like the rest of us you're just sat there waiting and thumb twiddling 🙂

heymrdj

sean
Does this work even for Imap email?

webscience

Sean probably is human and needs to have a sleep as well ;-). I also cannot access two email accounts, and my Thunderbird client has an empty inbox and sent box, which is scary. I'm sure Sean will get everything back up and running. Losing two years of email is a thought that i want to stay far away from.

sean

webscience Sean probably is human

🤣 Thanks for the support - the restore is going well and we're feeling pretty good about the potential for success 🤞

wearedementors

A question that I have been thinking since this happened, is the mail in opalstack hosted on a "baremetal" type machine? Or is it something more reliable with several cloud-type servers?

Being totally in agreement with the adopted solution and being happy with the opalstack service and its team, perhaps it would be a point to review the infrastructure. Surely they can learn from this.

sean

wearedementors our IMAP storage servers are massive bare metal machines.

heymrdj Be interested in your thoughts on backup and Pop v Imap

If he uses POP3 then he'll have access to his mail only on a single device, unless he's doing POP3 downloads on every device. Even then, his mail will be in different states on every device, sent messages would only be stored on one device etc.

Also if their POP3 settings are to delete messages after downloading then he would lose the ability to read his old mail on the webmail server.

It also means that when he gets a new computer or device then he'll have to transfer the mail to the new device manually. If the old device is dead and they've got no backup, then their mail is gone forever.

If none of that is important to your client then POP3 would be OK I guess.

My choice for my own stuff is always IMAP + personal backups.

sean

heymrdj I believe that Microsoft's instructions will work to back up any mail account in your Outlook setup. I do not use Outlook so I can't be certain. If you use Outlook then you can try it yourself to confirm.

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