Postini email trial

Today Bob posted an service status to say that the trialists would be moved over this afternoon. He also made a post on the Community forums which indicated that you would see differences in your MX records once you were moved over:

It will take up to 48 hours for DNS to fully propagate but once it has your MX records will look a little like this:

;; ANSWER SECTION:

username.plus.com.     86400   IN      MX      10 mx-postini.core.plus.net.

username.plus.com.     86400   IN      MX      20 mx-postini.last.plus.net.

I've not seen any changes in my MX records and I applied for the trial within 30 minutes of the posts telling us about it so I reckon it should be one of the first. Has anyone else seen any changes?

I would have hoped that if the roll out had been delayed they would have posted another announcement.

John,

Your records are pointing to Postini now at least (As are mine) - I have to say I think you over-reacted here, having seen three of four posts in different places from you about the same thing.

Ian

Ian,

A service status was posted saying that the changes were to be made between 2pm and 6pm.

Changing mail configuration has the potential for us to stop receiving any mail if it goes wrong.

Plusnet has "history" when it comes to making changes with mail systems.

Surely you can understand that we would want to check things out once the changes had been made - although we understand you've been using it for some time on your internal systems we seen no posts that indicate anyone had been using it successfully on the main mail systems (e.g. PUG members) so we didn't have that comfort factor.

The changes did not happen when we were told they would and it all went very, very quiet at your end - when that happens I get suspicious Do you not think we had every right to be concerned?

Just how much effort would it have taken to put out an amended service status saying when the work was actually going to be done?

Hi Jelv,

I'm sure we could have set a better expectation with the Comms (When couldn't you say that!), but as far as I can see the work is still going to plan and the changes were made in the DNS back-end at the time we said.

The problem seems to be that the DNS took longer to reload than we expected. As customers were in a position to monitor that I do struggle a bit with why you might be so concerned, but yeah, I can see why it's probably fair comment based on history. There was no one around in a position to post an update last night (We do have to let Bob go home sometimes), and because there was no particular problem with anything (At which point a P1 would have been raised and a call-out / service status incident generated by the duty support guys) we didn't set the right expectation. For that I apologise, even if I still think you over-reacted a bit!

Ian

Bob had warned us that the changes would take time to propagate - which is why I was explicitly checking the authoritative name servers - we had been given no indication that there would be delays in the changes appearing on ns1.force9.net. At 6pm nothing had changed so I posted to the forums - no response. Only much later when we had had no update, and I'd seen at least one member of Plusnet staff who usually keeps us in the picture come and go on the Community forums did I start posting around to see if anyone else had any idea what was happening.

When you asked for trialists, I'd assumed you wanted people who would monitor what happened carefully and report back any problems promptly. When we do that, I for one don't like being treated like a mushroom!

I think you have over reacted to John's over reaction

OK then, fair cop - sorry John.

Ian

"I for one don't like being treated like a mushroom!"

and there was me thinking you were a fun guy....

I would like to call for an immediate throttling of airway bandwidth (over the breath protocol) after that dreadful pun

Now we have the air cleared over the miscommunication over the timing of the changes I have something more positive to report.

Spam has stopped and genuine emails are getting through in good time.