Corporate Blog

The email world is constantly evolving. More to the point, spam is a never-ending arms race. We have made some changes to our email system, and in the New Year we will be making more.

So far all we have done is add a second alternative route for outbound emails. This gives us (and our clients) a third possible point from which emails can be delivered to your recipients. This action is the result of our data centres’ IP addresses finding themselves in more blacklists as a result of poor management, and the bad behaviour of their other customers.

Our use of this service will result in some very minor changes to the headers of some of these emails when viewed by the recipients. Almost nobody pays any attention to the headers of emails until there is a problem, but we are telling our clients this in advance so that you are aware of it.

There is nothing you need to change in your email programs or apps. The only thing you need to do is forward errors to us if a bounce message for an email you have sent refers to being blocked, as opposed to the destination address not existing or being full. If your email was blocked we can divert future emails to that domain via an alternative route. This option has always been available, but for the reason stated above we’re getting more reports now than in the past.

That addresses an immediate issue. Plans were already in progress for a scheduled upgrade to our primary mail server, but now they have an additional focus: We will be setting up a new mail server in another data centre where the reputations of their IP addresses are an explicit priority.

This plan will probably protect NinerNet for a couple more years. However, with the way the email world is moving, there are some predictions that all IP addresses will eventually be blocked from sending email except for a select few. I don’t believe I need to explain how this will concentrate power over email in the hands of a few, and how detrimental this will be, so we expect that reputable data centres will oppose this. Those are the kinds of data centres we want to work with, but we will maintain accounts with third-party relay providers just in case.

We will be posting more on the subject of email, specifically details of our migration, and information you need to know to ensure that your email will not be considered spam, either by us, our spam filters or your customers.

Please contact NinerNet support If you have any questions or concerns. Thank-you.