Vineyard.NET is slowly transitioning towards a more
standards compliant website that separates the look and
feel
of the site from the content.
This is done using a technology called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Unfortunately, support for CSS in older browsers (specifically, anything prior to a version 5.0) ranges from poor and incomplete to simply wrong and painful for both viewers and designers. Ultimately, there is no way to reliably design a CSS-based layout for older web browsers. Vineyard.NET will continue to ensure the overall functionality of its website for older browsers but the overall experience will be a little more spartan than before.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and invite you to consider upgrading your web browser. For what it's worth, we like Mozilla but just about any modern browser, including Internet Explorer, should suffice.
16, June 2004, 10:52pm - We're sorry to report that our mail problem continues. And unfortunately, we don't seem to be much closer to a fix than we've been all day. Rest assured that we will be working thru the night in an attempt to solve these issues. Please accept our apology and our gratitude for your patience. We will try to post any status update here.
7, June 2004, 11:56am - We are still working hard to solve the email problems. Eric stopped to sleep for two hours at about 3am when he thought he had resolved the problem. At 5am, he went back to work. We now have two servers trying to wade thru the backlog of undelivered mail. One of the servers is not filtering spam as well as the other.
There are in excess of 200,000 messages in the queue waiting to be sent and delivered (of those messages, more than half are spam...what a crime!). While mail is not working correctly as yet, messages are getting through. You will notice a slow trickle of mail - and more spam than usual - in your mailbox. We continue to do nothing else but work on the mail servers and answer customer phone calls. We know there is a mail problem. We are working non-stop in an effort to solve the problem.
We do not know at this moment when it will be fixed, but please know that we will not stop trying until the problem is solved. We are grateful for your patience while we try to make things work correctly again. Thanks for your understanding.
The first order of business is to offer our most humble thanks for your patience in the face of our email problems. We were doing nothing but trying to figure out what was slowing the delivery. It was not a single event that caused the problem - and while it's good for us and good for you, Eric is pretty much at the top of the heap technically when it comes to email. There is a very small handful of people we can call for definitive information beyond what we already know....which lengthened the amount of time it took to make things work better.
We *think* that our problem had to do with the ever increasing SPAM and virus load. Because of our filtering, and because we have been offering filters for a long time, most people don't have a good idea of how many SPAM and virus-laden emails we really get. It's impressive. In the last 24 hours, we have filtered 1315 viruses (mostly "Somefool p" - which is a variant of Netsky), 93,000 identified SPAM messages and 80,000 that were rejected due to a lack of a deliverable address.
Eric continues to labor on things that will make it more difficult for a situation like we had last week to happen again. We've upgraded and in most cases, doubled every part of the mail system (some parts have been upgraded twice or three times!). As far as our logs show, the mail is being sent and received more quickly than it was before the problem started. If you are seeing different behavior, please let us know. While we'd love to tell you that it absolutely won't happen again, we can't. There are so many pieces that have to work perfectly for your email to work. What we can tell you is that we are making every human effort to make the mail system bullet-proof. I think you'll agree that we've always maintained a very good uptime record.
Thanks again for your patience! We're sorry to have been the vehicle to cause you inconvenience. When the new mail system is finished to Eric's satisfaction, he hopes to pen a report that will discuss the different aspects of the emergency and what steps were taken in the effort to solve the problem. We will let you know when that's available - should you be interested.
We noticed yesterday around noon that the mail system had another delivery lag. The volume of spam on our system has increased more than 10-fold over the last year. Several user accounts are each receiving upwards of 10,000 pieces of SPAM each day. The mail load has gone from about 40 per minute to more than 200 per minute - and of course, most of it is SPAM. This is what's causing the lag. We are making our systems less receptive to this type of problem. Unfortunately, this might have adverse effects if your machine is somehow misconfigured; we have tried in the past to be tolerant of various problems with older machines; but we can no longer do that. Once we manage to slow down the flood, the backlog should start to clear up.
When the crisis has passed, we will elaborate on the possible misconfiguration issues. In the meantime, we are in overdrive trying to implement a solution to the immediate problem. We know this is causing problems - especially for our business customers. We offer our most sincere apology to all users.