E-mail Delays

Date Posted: March 12, 2008

BTInet Customers,

Thank you for choosing to use BTInet as your ISP of choice for e-mail services. We know that some of our users have been experiencing intermittent problems with e-mail delays and we would like to take this time to update everyone on additional changes we are implementing to help improve the quality of your e-mail experience through BTInet.

What has been happening?

To put it simply, SPAM. Let us be clear, we are not trying to make light of your concerns about your e-mail; instead, we are letting you know that SPAM is a major concern for many ISP’s today. To put this in better perspective, BTInet processed 35,005,026 e-mail messages in January alone. Of these 35,005,026 messages, only 1,805,309 messages were legitimate e-mails. This means approximately 95% of all mail processed in January was SPAM, with a vast majority of that SPAM being blocked before it ever reached your Inbox. We have been seeing similar volumes for February and March as well.

In addition to the steady increase in the amount of SPAM that has been propagating over the Internet, we experienced an unexpected hardware failure of one of our Barracuda SPAM Firewalls on Monday, March 10. Further detail on this failure can be seen here.

What we have been doing.

We have been working closely with Barracuda Network's support to try and address the intermittent e-mail delays that have been occurring, part of which included further blocking of confirmed SPAM messages before they were allowed to reach the mail system. These changes, and others, have helped to improve system reliability overall and lessened the amount of delays that have been occurring. Outside of the recent hardware outage on March 10, it appears that we have reached a permanent and viable solution to these delays.

What we are doing going forward.

It is our goal to provide reliable, affordable Internet and hosting services to our customers and the recent delays in e-mail are not acceptable. We are currently evaluating different solutions to the problem as we want to decide on a technology that is scalable, supportable and affordable.

As a temporary measure, we will be deploying an additional SMTP mail server running Spam and Virus scanning software to help handle the current high mail volume. While this server is operational, you may see a small increase in the amount of SPAM that reaches your Inbox. We feel that this is a small price to pay to speed up the delivery of legitimate e-mail, especially considering that this is a temporary measure.

The cost of providing e-mail services has been steadily increasing. We are committed to preventing having to pass these costs onto our customers, and will continue to make every effort to do so; however, further down the road, it may become necessary to re-evaluate how much we charge for this service and if it is inline with the costs expended to offer it.

What you can do.

It should also be noted that certain viruses can allow your computer to be used to send SPAM without your knowledge. To help avoid this from happening, we highly recommend that you install anti-virus software on all your computers, keep the software current with frequent software updates, and run periodic full system scans of your computer to remove any possible infections.

Also, be conscious of how you use your e-mail address so that it does not get into the hands of a Spammer.

1. Do not register your e-mail address online with companies that do not have a solid privacy agreement stating they will not share or sell your information. If you must register an address, consider setting up a free e-mail address with services like Yahoo! or Hotmail for this purpose.
2. Do not reply to a suspicious e-mail asking to be removed from their distribution list, or click the "remove me from your distribution list" link in the e-mail. Non-legitimate individuals use these features to verify they have a valid e-mail address and will then send SPAM to your address, or worse, sell your address to others to use in their SPAM lists.
3. Do not open an e-mail from a suspicious source as it could contain embedded code or hidden graphic files that "reports back" to the sender that this e-mail was opened, again confirming that the Spammer has a legitimate e-mail address. Instead, delete the message without doing anything with it.

Thank you again for your patience as we continue to improve the service we offer to you. Each of our customers is very important to us, and we want to assure you that we are committed to providing you with the most reliable Internet and e-mail service possible. If you have any questions, or are a business interested in other mail solutions through BTInet, please don't hesitate to contact us. 

BTInet Staff