Over the last two days we have become aware of an increase in the amount of spam arriving in customers inboxes. The cause has been identified as a failure on one of our inbound gateways.

Becuase of how the system works this did not affect the delivery of mail. The fallback is to simply deliver all mail. This failure only affected one of our gateways. The other gateways continued to filter correctly. This meant the increase in spam was only small.

The problem has now been rectified and customers inboxes should again become less burdened with spam.

We have today enabled the ASP.NET Session State Service on all web servers. This will allow for sessions to be held byt he service rather than the website worker process.

The advantage of this is that sessions will not be destroyed if the worker process is recycled.

To take advantage of this service you need to edit your web.config file. Details at the URL below

http://support.aguk.net/article.aspx?id=10208

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ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX 1.0 has now been installed on all web servers. For more information visit the Microsoft Official ASP.NET AJAX Site

Please note that ASP.NET runs in medium trust on all web servers which may affect the functionality of certain components.

Today [14 May 2007] at approximately 08:15GMT we became aware of an issue affecting the server BART. The server was not responding to web or ping requests.

This server hosts web sites and the main stats server. As a result websites hosted on this server could not be accessed nor could the statistical data for any website hosted on the network.

The server was rebooted. However the server failed to restart. Engineers began checking the server system. It was discovered that the servers RAID array had become corrupt and needed to be reset and rebuilt.

Over the last 3 months the amount of email handled by our mail system has increased by 720%.

More than 98% of this mail is unsolicited commercial email (spam). This is placing added preassure on our systems and causing our spam protection systems to become less effective.

One of the major contributing factors to this problem is the use of catch-all email accounts. This is where one email address will accept mail for anything sent to that domain.

We have updated all web servers to use 1.8.0.1 version of ASPJpeg.

Customers can now take advantage of the additional functionality this provides.

Please note that the previous issues regarding over reporting of diskspace and bandwidth usage have now been resolved. [http://portal.aguk.net/2007/02/bandwidth-usage-reporting/]

The figures now dislayed in Helm are correct as of the 23rd February 2007. These figures will now be used for future billing purposes.

Due to a technical problem with our payment systems some customers may not have been charged for invoices outstanding in Helm over the last two months. However the invoice may still have been marked as PAID within Helm.

This issue has now been resolved. Customers may notice multiple charges on their stored credit/debit card. This is to clear any balances outstanding where payment was not taken last month.

Customers can check their account balance by logging in to Helm and proceeding to

Billing > Account Statements

This is an important announcement. AGUK Solutions Ltd has released updated terms and conditions.

Terms and Conditions for the Provision of Services from AGUK Solutions Ltd
http://aguk.net/legal/tos/

Terms and Conditions for Website Hosting, Email Services and Domain Name Registration
http://aguk.net/legal/hosting-terms/

It is very important you read the updated terms and conditions. These terms and conditions are effective immediately. If you continue to use services provided by AGUK Solutions Ltd then you agree to be bound by these terms and conditions.

We have discovered that at around 15:00GMT today the POP3/IMAP service failed. This meant that POP3/IMAP connections were being rejected by the mail server.

This was rectified at 17:04GMT. The cause of the outage is currently unknown and is being investigated. We are also investigating why our notification script which periodically logs in to the POP3 server failed to notify us of the error.

An investigation is now taking place.

Further details will be forthcoming.