News and Updates

April 16, 2021 11:00am – We have received some reports of email delivery not working.  We are currently investigating the issue, and it seems to be related to the quota system.   We will be posting more information here has we determine what is going on.  Currently, affected users are not receiving email and senders to those users are not receiving bounces.

Update 11:20am –  The issue has been resolved.  Apparently, a software update was pushed last night which caused the problem.  The update has been rolled back.  We believe email that encountered the issue was lost, but we are still investigating that.

Update 11:35am – It looks like email affected by this issue *was lost*.  The sender did NOT get a bounce indicating a problem had occurred and the recipient did not receive the message.  This is a worst-case scenario in email delivery, and we do apologize for the trouble.   Please contact anyone who may have sent you an email this morning.  We are looking into the exact time the issue started.

If you have any questions, please contact us via Chat (lower right of your screen) or email support@internetpro.net.

March 26, 2021 7:00AM – Service to all Sparklight fiber customers in the Gadsden, AL area is down. Part of the fiber plant that services the Gadsden area was severely damaged in the tornado that went through the Wellington/Ohatchee area. We will update this post as more information becomes available to us.

Update March 27 9:15am – Sparklight still does not have an estimated time to repair.  We believe this will be an extended outage possibly lasting several days.  We recommend implementing your business continuity plan if you do not have a backup internet source.  Please contact us if you need assistance with this.

Update 10:45am – Message from our contact at Sparklight “I was just informed that fiber service to your area has now been restored albeit temporary. Please note that the area where it was damaged is still undergoing major construction. In fact our service is already working even before new power poles have been installed. I just wanted to let you know that information in the event that the service goes off again due to another cut by all of the equipment in the area. Thank your for your patience during this devastating event.” 

If you have any questions, please contact us at 256-547-6817 or support@internetpro.net.

March 17, 2021 – Network Solutions, Inc. will be closing at 2:00pm due to the inclement weather.  Phone and chat technical support will still be available, but our front office will be closed and we will not be dispatching technicians onsite for the rest of the day.

You can also reach support by email at support@internetpro.net.

February 8, 2021 – We’ve identified an issue with our hosted Exchange platform which is causing delays in receiving email.  Email can be sent from customers without error, but that email is also not properly being delivered in a timely manner.  No email is being lost, but it is being queued for retry later.   This issue seems to have been happening a few hours as of 2:45pm.   We are investigating the cause and working on a resolution.  Updates will be posted here.

Update 3:10pm – We’ve identified the issue as a forced update by the antivirus/antispam software being used.  It is an “engine update” which requires a reboot/reload of services.  Those actions are being performed now, but due to the size/nature of the servers and services, it does take a bit of time to complete.  We do not currently have an estimated time, but the work is in progress.

Update 3:45pm – Services are beginning to come back online.  We expect full restoration shortly.

Update 3:52pm – Internal testing indicates everything is fully back online.  If you are a hosted Exchange customer, expect email to begin coming in now if  you haven’t already seen some.  It may take a little while for emails sent earlier in the day to reach your Inbox, but they should all arrive with no further issues.  If you have any questions or concerns about this, please contact us via support@internetpro.net, 256-547-6817, or utilize the chat window to the lower right of your screen.

December 15, 2020 – We began receiving calls about Gmail email not going through starting at about 5:15pm tonight.   Failure notices are being returned stating that the server does not like the recipient and that the account does not exist.    An example can be found below:

–BEGIN

—–Original Message—–
From: MAILER-DAEMON@mail.internetpro.net
[mailto:MAILER-DAEMON@mail.internetpro.net]
Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2020 5:01 PM
To: REDACTED
Subject: failure notice

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mail.internetpro.net.
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.

<REDACTED>:
Remote host 173.194.219.27 does not like recipient REDACTED
Remote host said: 550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does
not exist. Please try
550-5.1.1 double-checking the recipient’s email address for typos or
550-5.1.1 unnecessary spaces. Learn more at
550 5.1.1 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser d202si206486ybh.359
– gsmtp

–END

This seems to be Google having another issue after their earlier problems on Monday.   Many users are experiencing issues again.  Please note that these problems are not related to our email system and that messages which are bounced in the manner described above will NOT go through.  They will have to be sent again when Google resolves their issues.

Update – Google reports that this has been resolved.  Again, any emails bounced during this outage will need to be resent.  This is not an issue with our delivery system and is entirely on Google’s side.  We cannot control the delivery of those bounced emails.   For a status report, please see this status page.

Monday December 7, 2020 – We will be performing some scheduled maintenance tonight, starting at approximately 11:00pm.  This will be a short maintenance item and is expected to last around 30 minutes.  Email services will be affected.   We recommend closing your email programs before the end of business day so that your email program doesn’t lose connection to the servers.

Update 10:30pm – Maintenance started a bit early.  Will update as things progress.

Update 11:10pm – Maintenance is complete.  All systems running normally. It does look like some did not heed the advice to shut down email clients, but there should be no adverse side effects.

If you have any questions about this maintenance, please call 256-547-6817 during normal business hours.

November 16, 2020 4:10pm – This post comes after the resolution of the issue as the server failure also affected this web site.  At approximately 3:20pm, one of our web servers experienced a hardware issue.  The equipment was pulled from the rack and repaired.  However, when the server was brought back online, the database server did not restart resulting in many users seeing messages like “Unable to establish database connection”.   Initially, we thought that there had been some corruption of the database during the failure.  However, we found that a repair previously made on a database on the server was not properly cleaned up by the technician.  The server was trying to load the corrupted backup of the database which was repaired (months ago) and was failing.  We managed to locate the bad database and remove it and service was restored at approximately 4:05pm.

This server will be monitored on our test bench for a few days before being returned to the production rack during a scheduled maintenance window.

If you are still experiencing problems which might be related to this issue, please email us at support@internetpro.net or call 256-547-6817.  We do apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

October 30, 2020 – We’ve been seeing an uptick in phishing attempts in the last couple of days and wanted to remind users that Network Solutions, Inc. will never reach out to you through email to confirm your password.  These emails are attempts for spammers to get your password so they can use your account to send spam through it.  Overnight, our support email box received at least 8 of these email attempts. Fortunately, our spam filtering system sent all of these to the SPAM folder and that should be your first clue  to not trust these emails.   The most common right now is a “security alert” which states that a new device has accessed your account.  It looks like the screenshot below:

Another attempt is asking for verification on your webmail.  Notice that it looks nothing like our webmail.  That version looks like this:

Please be vigilant when checking your email.  It is important to make sure links look legitimate and if someone is asking for passwords, it is most likely a scam. Our technical support team is available to answer questions you might have about suspicious emails, so please don’t hesitate to reach out to us via phone at 256-547-6817, email support@internetpro.net or chat using the chat bubble on the lower right of your screen.

Monday October 12, 2020 11:15am – At 11:09, we detected an issue with the email filesystem related to the issues we experienced up until September 25th (see: https://www.netsolinc.com/email-issues-3/).  We  jwere able to restore service at 11:24.   We are disappointed that our earlier fix was not permanent and are looking into options.

Update – Thursday November 19, 2020  1:45pm – Again we experienced an issue with the mail server after over 1 month of uptime.  Problems of this nature which can take weeks to manifest are very difficult to fix and/or be sure they are actually fixed.   We’ve put a new switch in place and are working to restore service.

Update 2:30pm  – Service restoration is proving difficult.  We are working with vendor support now as well.

Update 3:25pm – Service has been restored.  We are monitoring systems for stability.

Update 3:35pm – Backed up traffic has come in and been processed.  Server load went up as expected and all systems performed well.  Everything should be back to normal now.

If you are still experiencing issues, please give us a call at  256-547-6817 or use the chat window at the lower right of your screen.