noticeboard.ru.ac.za

Maintenance will be performed on the IMAP mail server starting from 5 PM this evening continuing through the night. During that time, there will be long periods when staff & students will not be able to read their mail, but mailboxes should be available before morning. Incoming messages received during the maintenance will be queued and delivered to your mailbox once maintenance is completed. It will still be possible to send outgoing messages (provided that your mail client is able to send messages without access to your mailbox).

It has become urgent that this maintenance be completed before the start of the next term, hence the short notice.

This maintenance has been completed, and IMAP services are now available once more.

Regretably, during the maintenance, some incoming messages were unintentionally returned to their senders (bounced). Approximately 2000 messages which were either:

• received between 22:30 and 1:50 tonight; or
• had been received prior to that time, but were awaiting delivery to a mailbox which was over its quota

were bounced. We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused.

As a result of this upgrade, we cannot currently create or update accounts. In addition, staff will be unable to change their passwords. This is a temporary problem that should be resolved during the course of today or tomorrow.

We've had reports that some mail clients have problems connecting to the IMAP server. During the course of the maintenance the IMAP server was upgraded and reconfigured. This new configuration requires that IMAP clients correctly support redirection. Thus far all the reports we've had of problems come from people using very, very old IMAP clients (e.g. Pegasus Mail version 3.x, PINE, etc). The solution in all of these cases is to upgrade your e-mail client to the latest version (or, if your mail client is no longer actively developed, to change to a client that supports modern IMAP extensions.)