We have a few customers using the Tucows mailbox service which is advertised to have "99.99%" availability (taken from the service description on rrc.tucows.com). This morning, their email stopped working again for at least the 3rd or 4th time in the past two months. As with previous times, the expected outage duration is several hours in the middle of the North American workday. At this point, some of them are calling us to ask why their email service is so unreliable and are asking for alternate providers.
I understand that it is VERY hard to provide highly-available email services in the current Internet environment. We manage an email system for another customer that supports 5000 users and processes over 200K messages per day with virus and (limited) spam filtering. That system is small compared to any big-name email providers, but it is still hard as heck to keep things running smoothly. However, in spite of some serious scalability problems on that customer's current backend system (IMail), we have managed to achieve better availability than the Tucows service. We don't (currently) offer our own in-house email service because it is so hard to do well, but at this point, we could offer significantly better uptimes by throwing up a single server with a RAID drive and keeping spare hardware on hand. I really need a better story to tell our current Tucows email customers. Can they expect the current service problems to continue for the foreseeable future or are there real reasons why they should expect things to improve? We have other customers asking us for spam filtering services that I would prefer to point to the Email Defense service, but I can't recommend it given the multi-hour outages that happen every few weeks. Otherwise, we continued to be thrilled with the other Tucows services we sell (DNS and certificates). -- David P. Maynard OutServ.net, Inc. -- Coordinated IT Operations Solutions Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED], Tel: +1 512 977 8918, Fax: +1 512 853 9476 --
