[Complete] Hosted Email Maintenance

We need to perform routine maintenance on our mail.anu.net Hosted Email platform.

Impacted services: All email accounts on our mail.anu.net Hosted Email platform. You will be unable to download new mail, reply to existing emails or send new emails.

The vast majority of our clients are using our SpamTitan spam filtering solution and all new mail will be queued for delivery in SpamTitan.

For the handful of clients who are not using SpamTitan, the sender’s mail server should hold the mail and try to deliver it again later. There may be a short delay as how often delivery is retried is determined by the sender’s mail server.

Estimated start time: 5th April 2020, 21:00 UK (BST)
Estimated time of completion: 5th April 2020, 22:00 UK (BST)

UPDATE 6th April 2020 02:55 UK: This maintenance work has just begun. Apologies for the delay on this.

UPDATE 6th April 2020 03:25 UK: This maintenance work is now complete. Once again, apologies for the delay.

Please contact support@anu.net if you have any queries relating to this maintenance.

Hosted Email: Insecure Connections being phased out 1st June, 2020

We have always tried to make it easy for customers to use our Hosted Email service and this includes supporting a wide array of protocols, encryption methods and ports.

Encrypted connections to mail servers are now commonplace and all modern mail clients support them. Over 75% connections to our Hosted Email service are currently encrypted.

We will be phasing out insecure IMAP, POP3 and SMTP email connections on our Hosted Email platform on the 1st June, 2020. We will be contacting clients directly affected by this change multiple times and will have a number of blackout hours as outlined in the timetable below.

  • 23rd – 27th March 2020: We will look at incoming insecure connections and email clients directly affected letting them know they have until the 1st June 2020 to sort this and offer assistance if necessary.
  • 20th – 24th April 2020: We will generate a new list of remaining insecure connections and email clients with a reminder.
  • 18th – 22nd May 2020: We will generate a new list of remaining insecure connections and email clients with a final reminder.
  • 25th, 27th and 29th May 2020: At 10am UK time we will disable insecure IMAP, POP3 and SMTP connections for 1 hour.
  • 1st June 2020: We will disable insecure IMAP, POP3 and SMTP connections permanently.

To ensure you are connecting to our Hosted Email service securely and to ensure you’re using our most up to date, recommended mail client settings, please visit this help page: https://blog.anu.net/hosted-email-connection-settings/

If you have any questions, concerns or feedback or if you need any assistance, do not hesitate to contact us by emailing support@anu.net

CentOS 8 now available at Anu

While we have a small percentage of other distributions running for specific purposes, our standard Linux distribution of choice is CentOS. CentOS is an Enterprise Linux distribution which is ideally suited for long term and stable server deployments. This is in contrast to distributions like Fedora, which has a fast release cycle, the latest cutting edge software versions, and is targeted more at end users and developers.

Major CentOS version releases only come around every 3-4 years, so when a new version comes along it is a great opportunity to upgrade older servers. Major new releases always bring new features as well as security and performance enhancements, but can also pose challenges if your application or code base requires major upgrades or changes to run smoothly on the new OS.

CentOS 8 was recently released and is now available for new VM deployments at Anu.

CentOS 6 will become end of life on 30 November 2020, so now would be a good time to start planning to upgrade either to CentOS 7 or 8.

We recognise that a major OS upgrade can be time consuming and challenging for some customers. In order to facilitate a smooth upgrade, we offer our customers running CentOS 6 and 7 a complimentary new CentOS 8 VM with the same spec, running in parallel to the existing VM. Should it be required, we can provide migration support including data transfer and porting configurations for a modest fee. Once customer applications have been tested and are running smoothly on the new VM, the old one is deleted and billing switches to the new VM.

In case the customer requires more than 30 days to complete the upgrade, both servers will be billed after 30 days, until the transfer is complete.

Not sure which CentOS version you’re running? Check the Webmin dashboard, or run ‘cat /etc/redhat-release‘ from the command line.

Ready to upgrade? Ping us an email on support@anu.net and we’ll get you started.