Mike

In effect to better serve you, early this morning we began an update on all shared servers to a new mail sorting format Maildir.

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What is Maildir?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir
http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/

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Why was this necessary?
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This mail sever update is necessary with the upcoming cPanel11 launch within the next few weeks.

http://www.cpanel.net/products/cPane...l11/index.html

Our research and testing team has experienced issues with the old mail sorting format (mbox) with early builds of cPanel11.
We also began noticing slight issues with June 5, 2007 RELEASE build of cPanel 11 on some servers on the network. cPanel updates are great and necessary for this control panel, but with our experience in the past its best to take every measure to make sure auto updates do not leave any service issues.

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How do I know if I was or am effected? Symptoms
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About 60% of our shared servers were upgraded this morning. The remainder will be updated soon. We will announce the next phase in this forum post.

You may experience the following during this time:
-IMAP errors when checking mail via web mail
-login error message prompts when checking mail via desktop mail clients

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How long does this take, why cant I get my email still?
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On average the conversion takes from 2-8 hours. It is hard to estimate the time because it depends on the sizes of the mailboxes of the users on the server. On a shared server there are many clients, many domains and tons of mailboxes and mail messages.
If you have the inability to check mail, possess the symptoms above, you should know this process has began and will conclude shortly.

Feel free to contact our helpdesk for a followup, we can contact you once this is complete on the server you are hosted on.

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Will I lose any mails during this time?
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No you will not. Any mails sent to your domain on a shared server undergoing conversion will be queued for delivery. This delivery will commence once the conversion is complete.

One example of the mail log entry of a queued message during conversion:
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2007-06-08 10:21:49 1HwfLY-0000pu-Nr == usernamedomain.com R=temp_defer defer (-1): Mail Server Upgrade in Progress. Message Queued.
-----


If you are missing messages and need them ASAP please contact our support staff and we can push through a mail queue run.


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What else?
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Side affects to this upgrade are not severe.
To name a few:
-Removal of neomail
-Inability to switch between email accounts while logged into web mail programs
-Some inability to view mail folders. We may need to import them into horde for you.
-Web mail address book missing

Most users will not notice a different other then possibly less problematic error free mail delivery.

More issues may arise and we can properly assess your specific mail situation if you are having problems by contacting our support staff:
http://desk.surpasshosting.com

VPS and Dedicated information on this mail sorting format change will follow this message.
We would recommend upgrading to maildir ASAP
You can run the following script via ssh to update your server:
/scripts/convert2maildir

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Im still having issues
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The best resolve for these issues is via the helpdesk, this way everything is documented.

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Please note
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Preventative measures such as this are always necessary in the shared hosting environment, we must act quick for the good of the server.
If you were adversely affected by this upgrade and cannot take a minute of mail downtime then we suggest a more isolated environment where you can have more control over updates and software versions. We can tailor solutions such as VPS and Dedicated better for your specific needs.

Our support staff believes this update could have been done with more notice to you and at a better time. We will move forward and will not perform any major changes that have such a high caliber of impact without a public address such as this.

__________________
Mike
Surpass Special Operations

Bigjohn

Mike -

Please review the "make spam assassin work for you" thread, and ensure that there are accurate and complete instructions on how to convert the scripts to work with MAILDIR vs the original mbox configurations. This is way beyond MY capabilities, but I believe that some recent discussions in the thread may result in a functioning script.

I make this point because, to kill our functioning SPAM ASSASSIN in favor of Cpanel 11 would hurt horribly.

__________________
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benjamin

Also, if there is ANY way to maintain the ability to view all email accounts when logging into webmail with the main user name, that would be great. This is a feature I would terribly miss because logging into each account separately would be a huge chore when not using Outlook or another such program.

Thanks.

__________________
Benjamin
Server: Pass44

kfunk

Could someone address my questions in the following thread, related to this conversion:

http://www.surmunity.com/showthread....250306#wrapper

__________________
KFunk.net
Server: Yesenia

Bigjohn

Oh yeah. I just read this:

That's bad.
I use Thunderbird, and I have 8 email accounts logged in there at all times via Imap. I use this to move and sort and tag SPAM. If this stops working, I will, umm, SCREAM.

__________________
Proud to be a Surmunity Mod!
XEON PASS60 PASS61
Make a fundamental difference!
My Sites:
Curious about Brewing Beer? Join the community!
>>>>> Some Change is GOOD! Keep your paycheck! Support the Fair Tax
Get into an Art museum
Victorian London
It's your brain -ON WEB - mybrainhost.com (under development)
What SHOULD Government do? Much Less than it Does!

amal

Until now, there has been no work arounds for this.
We'll be researching more on it, and if there is a way out, we'll surely impliment this on our shared servers.

__________________
#######

Regards,
Amal
L3 Admin

Patty

I've been copping with this since I moved to Pass 66 back in November. And to be honest, I didn't see any benefits from this change. On the contrary, it made things more difficult and more unreliable IMO. I can't access all email accounts from the main account anymore, I can't trust the quota readings on cPanel because they're always wrong, I've had problems sending/receiving emails that didn't happen before....

Really, I still don't know what's the good thing about this.

I know things change and we have to move on. But they should be changing for good, not for worse. And to me, this was a change for worse. Now let's see what cPanel 11 will bring us. I'm afraid it will affect Pass 57 and it will become unstable like the others I was hosted at.

I never liked upgrades right after they come out. I like to wait a little, give it some time until the bugs are fixed and everything is smoothed out.

__________________
Patty

Pass 57 | Dime999 | SH 110

Bigjohn

I cannot underscore how IMPORTANT this is.

You're hearing from the few of us who are active in the forums... what happens when all of our CUSTOMERS (for those of us who are resellers) start complaining? And the people on shared servers who are just merrily plodding along, and then things that they do daily, and have for years, stop working....

I have this image in my head of "all hell breaking loose"....

__________________
Proud to be a Surmunity Mod!
XEON PASS60 PASS61
Make a fundamental difference!
My Sites:
Curious about Brewing Beer? Join the community!
>>>>> Some Change is GOOD! Keep your paycheck! Support the Fair Tax
Get into an Art museum
Victorian London
It's your brain -ON WEB - mybrainhost.com (under development)
What SHOULD Government do? Much Less than it Does!

loudestnoise

Well this explains all the problems I've been having. I mean I check the surmunity forums often, but it might have been nice to receive some other kind of notification about this.

In Apple Mail, I now have double copies of most of my folders, ie Drafts, Sent, Trash, and in addition the mailboxlist folder shows up.

I'm by no means an expert on using IMAP, but with the new change, do I need to change my prefix from INBOX to something else? It doesn't help that Apple's Mail app doesn't have the best IMAP support to begin with. At first I thought I had lost email, but so far it's all there still. Now I am just trying to cosmetically correct my double folder issue, but I'm getting a lot of errors when trying to delete the extra folders.

__________________
Server: Quela
Domain: http://loudestnoise.com