20180712 - RESOLVED - e-mail delivery delays

[RESOLVED] We are currently experiencing delays in e-mail delivery.

We had an issue on one of our systems this morning with the process that initiates delivery of customer e-mails. The process appears to have hung, preventing new deliveries from occurring. As this has never been a problem before, we didn't have anything specific in place to monitor for this issue. As a result, it took longer than it should to detect the problem. As soon as we were alerted to the issue we were able to quickly locate hung process and restart it. Once the process was restarted, e-mail delivery started again.

At this time, the delivery queues for the affected accounts all appear to be up to date.

We are looking into options for better monitoring for issues like this, in the unlikely event that they occur again.
Edit - 20180712 12:15 CDT - Additional monitoring is now in place.

We apologize for any problems this may have caused. Please contact us if you continue to experience any problems.


We appreciate your patience during this work and welcome any feedback. Thank you for being a ETRN customer. Please contact us if you have any questions.

We Answer Your Questions: FAQ

Q: What is the maximum e-mail attachment size?

A: The ETRN.com e-mail servers do not limit the size of individual e-mail attachments. The ETRN.com e-mail servers do impose a 400 MB maximum total message size limit. Individual customers can choose a smaller message size limit. We can also customize the handling of "over-sized" e-mails. Please contact us to discuss your specific needs. A couple of important facts:

1. Attachments are typically encoded in what is called Base64[1]. As a result, the actual length of MIME-compliant Base64-encoded binary data is usually about 137% of the original file size.

2. E-mails often contain both plain text and HTML components. This also increases the overall size of the e-mail.