A number of customers have recently noticed a delay in sending and receiving emails via BluePhyre’s email server (mail.bluephyre.com).

We have investigated this problem and discovered a number of attempts to deliver spam emails to non-existent email addresses on our mail server. Mail sent to non-existent email addresses is normally "bounced" back in the form of a delivery failure notice (ideally we would reject non-existent email addresses up-front, but unfortunately our current email system isn’t built that way).

Occasionally these attempts by our server to deliver failure notices "hang", that is an outgoing connection is made to another mail server, but that connection isn’t closed in a timely manner. Since there is a limit on the number of outgoing connections our mail server is allowed to make at once, if enough connections "hang" the mail server slows down (since it has to wait longer for an available outgoing connection).

We have done a software reset on our mail server to clear all the "hung" connections and we have also increased the outgoing connection limit (by 150%). The backlog caused by the "hung" connections has now cleared and email is now proceeding via our mail server in a normal, timely manner (within seconds rather than hours).

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Thank you.

– Server Management Team