The Birdhouse datacenter is experiencing a severe upstream outage which is currently preventing all access. We don’t have more information at the moment but will post again when we do.

Five minutes later… Well that didn’t last long. The issue has been corrected and we’re back online. Thanks for your patience.

Update: Servint’s excellent blog post on the difficulty of diagnosing problems when routers get schizophrenic about their own health status.

To address  performance issues  related to IMAP connections coming from OS X Mail.app users (we have many of them!), we have switched the mail server software at Birdhouse from Courier to Dovecot. We expect that this change will allow Mail.app to connect to mail services more reliably.

Users may need to re-accept the SSL certificate for gong.birdhouse.org.

Some users will find some duplicate emails appear in their mail clients. This issue will primarily affect anyone still using POP3 rather than IMAP for mail checking.

Please let us know if you have questions about this change, or if you notice performance changes for better or for worse.

All Birdhouse SSL services have been patched and updated for the Heartbleed SSL vulnerability. All clear!

This upgrade includes significant security enhancements.  Users will notice minimal changes to the cPanel interface.

We’ve upgraded all MySQL instances from version 5.0 to 5.5, with an intermediate 5.1 upgrade in the middle. All WordPress and Django sites appear to be running normally after the upgrade – please let us know if you experience any issues.

PHP has been upgraded to the latest version available as of today. If you notice anything not working properly, please let us know.

Update: After a month of operation, ASSP was later removed. It was causing SMTP problems for many users, and was somewhat unreliable. We have returned to cPanel’s built-in SpamAssassin configuration. The original information is preserved below.

We’ve swapped our SpamAssassin spam filtering system with a much more sophisticated system called ASSP. Unfortunately, we’re experiencing a temporary resulting problem that prevents users from sending outbound through Birdhouse over SSL. We expect to have this worked out by this evening. In the meantime, please use the Birdhouse webmail systems if this affects you.

If you find that the new anti-spam system is being too aggressive, please let us know of any email senders that have been blocked, so we can train the filters.

Soon we’ll provide you with information on how to train the filters yourself. Stay tuned and thanks for your patience.

Update 6:30 pm: This problem has been solved! Unfortunately, the fix involves making a few tweaks to your SMTP server settings.  The change should be easy and quick. Please let us know if you need a hand making those changes.

In addition, we’ve now documented our shiny new spam controls – please have a look!

We’re planning to upgrade our installation of Apache to v. 2.2 and PHP to 5.2.5 on the afternoon of Sunday, April 20. After much research, we have concluded that we can do this safely without risk of breaking any existing customer scripts or software.  If you find that any functionality on your site is not working as expected, please contact us, and we’ll get things working quickly.

As a result of the recent removal of MailScanner from Birdhouse, spam configuration controls in cPanel have changed, as has the way the subject lines of suspected spam are marked.

Our Configure Spam Controls FAQ has been updated accordingly. If you were maintaining any server-side spam filters or rules, please see the FAQ, then log into cPanel and take a look to make sure your mail is being handled the way you want it to be.