qmail hosting (smtp1r.cp.blacknight.com / mail.blacknight.com) slow mail delivery

Message

Summary: The mail queues on our cluster are climbing. As such e-mail sent to you will be delayed for some time. Mail sent to outside E-mail addresses are not affected by this as they are in a different queue.

There are 2 reasons for this problem.

1) the number of pop/imap connections are at a critical level which is causing high IO wait for our storage backend.

2) In relation to point 1, this high IO wait is slowing down delivery of mail for the very same reason.

In order to rectify this problem we've been looking at a number of solutions. However we've not yet pinpointed a scalable solution that can cope with our current requirements and allow for future growth. The new storage platform put in place less than 12 months ago is at point where it can't really deal with more IO requests. As such we need to find a solution that will last more than 12 months and have enough data capacity to allow for growth.

We apologise for the lengthy delay in e-mail delivery and please understand that there will be a solution put in place sooner rather than later but that it will take some time.

Further updates will be posted here, we'll also announce in another post when we are putting the new storage backend in place. We hope to announce a timeline this week.