Modwest Blog

End of Forwarding to Comcast

Spam, spam, spam. The never-ending battle continues.

Some may remember about how we stopped allowing email forwarding to AOL last year. Spam that originates elsewhere, passes through Modwest, arrives at AOL, and is then reported to AOL by the recipient as being spam generates a complaint against Modwest as the source of the spam -- even though we were merely a conduit, forwarding mail as per our customer's preferences.

We now know that the same situation affects email auto-forwarded to Comcast, which has a similar policy. In the past month, we've asked Comcast to please resume accepting mail from Modwest customers at least a dozen times. They're usually responsive, but it's becoming an almost daily occurrence. At the moment I write this, nearly 1,000 messages are stuck here at Modwest because Comcast refuses to accept them. We hope to push them through to their final destinations at Comcast by the end of the day, but we need Comcast's cooperation to make that happen.

Therefore, because Comcast's anti-spam policies are regularly causing significant email delays (hours or days) for any Modwest customer who attempts to communicate with any Comcast customer, we cannot allow automatic forwarding to Comcast any longer. We'll soon be getting in touch with customers who rely on Comcast forwarding about their options.

(Incidentally, Yahoo is also blocking most Modwest customer mail at the moment, and we're working on clearing things up with them. UPDATE Feb 24: Yahoo is still blocking us, and not responding to requests for information and resolution.

Update Feb 27: Yahoo has not been terribly communicative but has let the vast majority of deferred messages through, finally.)

We always try to avoid removing features that customers have been using, and we may rescind this policy if other options become available, but we'll be preventing auto-forwarding to Comcast addresses starting next week.

-JM

Filesystem Performance: Not out of the woods, yet

As we've previously explained (here and here and here), Modwest has been challenged periodically to coax more performance out of the centralized storage architecture of our shared web hosting system. When system loads start to reach the point at which performance suffers, we address the issue by adjusting NFS and backup configurations, identifying resource-intensive sites and figuring out how to make them less so, and publishing tips for site owners about how to make their sites less storage-dependent.

Well, the issue has returned:

(The week-long gap at the end of January was the result of an operating system upgrade on the monitoring server which sort of deconfigured the graphing subsystem. Oops!)

As you can see from the graph (click it for a larger version), we're approaching 52-week highs again. Monday of this week was especially rough in the middle of the day.

We're pretty much run out of 'big stuff that needs fixing' on the current architecture, so now we make small changes, each of which could provide some incremental gain in performance via reduced utilization of the central storage system. In addition to finding a few super-frequent cron jobs (which rarely need super-frequency), one of the actions we've taken today is FTP rate-limiting. That means that if you're on a mega-fast uplink you might not see your full potential in FTP upload speed.

Of course what really needs to happen is a re-thinking of our centralized storage architecture. I'm happy to say we started that thought process more than a year ago. We already run a load balanced cluster of web servers, and a load balanced cluster of mail servers. Why not storage?

It's a hard problem, but a solvable problem to which we've been devoting a lot of engineering time over the past year. We're within three months or so of offering access to a "re-imagined" storage architecture that will not only address the issues we're currently experiencing, but will also open the door to some interesting features you won't find elsewhere.

-JM

P.S. I promise I'll publish more details about the new system soon, but as always, let us know of any questions by commenting below or otherwise contacting us.

Email changes: Attachment Size, Spam Filtering

This past week we made a couple improvements on our email systems that we think will be be better for everyone.

First, we changed the maximum email attachment size to twenty megabytes. This is more in line with other large email providers and will help some of our graphic designer and photographer customers send and receive the large files associated with their trade. Remote recipients might not be able to receive 20MB attachments sent through our system (since their email provider might have a different policy), but incoming attachments should come through just fine as long as they can make it through our dangerous content filters.

Second, all newly created mailboxes will have their spam filter turned on, and anything detected as spam will be placed in the Spam/ subfolder of the mailbox. Note that messages in the Spam/ and Trash/ folders are auto-deleted after a period of time.

We're committed to offering maximum control over your incoming messages and had to think hard about enabling the filter by default. But two things gave us confidence: a relatively commonly expressed concern from new customers that since transferring to Modwest, they seem to receive more spam, and the (directly related) discovery that the majority of our customers had not chosen to enable spam filtering at all. So this change should help with that phenomenon. Existing mailboxes are not affected by this change.

Questions? Comment below, or contact our support team.

-JM