Posts Tagged ‘email’

Some websites hosted by Kephart + Associates may have been unavailable intermittently this morning due to a failure in the DNS nameservers at our service provider, MediaTemple. The problem began about 10:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday. As of 12:15 p.m. EDT Tuesday, it appears that services have been restored, though there may be some residual issues as the nameservers come back online.

DNS nameservers are a special type of web server that act as a main directory for the web, pointing requests for pages from browsers to the proper web server that holds that page. If the nameservers are unavailable, pages can’t be served properly.

In addition to web pages, this outage may have also affected email service during the downtime, however all email should be delivered once service has been completely restored.

Thanks for your understanding.

I realized this morning when I checked my email that out of the eleven messages that had passed Gmail’s excellent spam filters, only one was from someone I know. The other ten were what I would call “permission spam,” messages from companies and organizations I’ve given permission to send email to me. Most of them I bought something from once and signed up for email updates at the same time.

It looks like one way to solve the email spam problem has been to move to other methods of communication. Email is so frustrating. Between the enormous amount of spam (Gmail marked another 150 messages as spam overnight) and the way both personal and work email addresses seem to change fairly often (how many of you have the same email addresses you had two years ago?), email just isn’t reliable. When you can use a service’s lack of reliability as a legitimate excuse for not replying to someone – “I sent it on Monday, it must have gotten stuck in your spam filter” – it’s no longer a good way to do business.

We’ve moved to other services: Facebook (status changes, wall posts and direct inbox messages), Twitter, SMS/MMS messaging on our phones, IM and others. While the ingenuity of spammers truly knows no bounds, so far these services are proving spam-free and reliable. Even Twitter rarely has the downtime issues they experienced during 2008.

How useful is email to you today? What alternatives are you using to communicate with friends, colleagues and customers?