Update 07:25 The migration is complete and our mail server is back online. Please let us know if you notice anything peculiar. This concludes our multi-step migration to the new mail server hardware

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In order to finalize the upgrade of the D-PHYS mail server, we schedule a maintenance downtime on

Tuesday, March 27, between 06:30 and 08:00 in the morning

During that time it will not be possible to send or receive emails. In particular, incoming external emails will not be lost, but held on the sender’s side and will be delivered after the migration. Outgoing mail will be kept in your mail client until the connection is restored.

We will update this posting once the mail server is back online.

New location for mail filtering rules, forwarding and vacation auto-replies

After the migration, all mail-related settings will be consolidated into the Roundcube Webmail interface:

• spam filtering rules (whitelist, blacklist)
• forwarding of your emails to a different account
• setting a vacation or out-of-office auto-reply message
• defining rules to automatically file incoming mails into specific folders

This will make configuring your email settings easier and also give you more options than before (for example, the out-of-office auto-reply can now be configured to automatically terminate at the end of your absence).

Please refer to our readme for details on how to customize these settings in the future. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

The current settings of all active users have been converted and imported.

In technical terms we are migrating from procmail to sieve. In particular the hidden text file ~/.procmailrc in the user's home folder will be ignored after the migration.

On Monday morning we found out that large incoming mails (1 MBytes or larger) were dropped without leaving any error messages in our log files. These mails were lost between Thursday (Jan 9) evening 18:27 and Monday (Jan 13) morning 11:06. Some indicators (i.e. spam filter rules for this case) lead us to estimate the number of about 560 broken local deliveries to about 300 unique recipients.

If you expected e-mails with attachments close to 1 MB or larger within this time frame there is a high likelihood that they got lost. The only information we still have about these mails are sender, recipient and arrival date and time. If you were one of these recipients, please contact the sender to send it again.

You can check on this web page if mails you should have received were lost. You'll have to log in with your D-PHYS account and will see sender (or mailing list) of and time when the lost mail arrived. Additionally we'll inform all affected recipients individually, too.

The problem occured after one of the software updates on Thursday which brought stricter code checking, and is solved since Monday morning 11:06.

The issue was caused by a long standing and subtle programming error in the check which prevents bigger mails from being inspected closely by the main spam filter for performance reasons. It was only triggered upon local mail delivery, so mails sent from D-PHYS to outside D-PHYS were not affected. E-mails to D-PHYS mailing lists (or other mailing lists) with archive should be available in the according mailing list archives.

We're truly sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused and have already taken measures so that similar issues won't result in mail loss from now on.

Update: it happens to the best of us: Gmail for iOS bug might cause data loss