What kind of support is that ?

I am really sorry the only way I have to vent my disapointment is to write on this forum. I have had severe email problems for 3 days, and so far all dreamhost did was to send me a general message sayng problems happened but have been solved. Well, they were not, and so far no one has focused on the specifics of what I am facing. Meanwhile, I am losing business.

Have you tried filing a support ticket? Have you read about the issues on the status blog?

-- si-blog --

Well that sucks. I hope the venting helps. Possibly if you shared some of the specifics, we might could help get you back in business.

What cluster are you on and what is your mail server? Is your email IMAP, POP3, webmail? Are all those options inoperative, or just one or another of them? Can you send but not receive, or is it the other way around, or can you do neither? Can you log into the shell, and have you tried to see if you can reach your email via mutt/pine? Have you tried to see if email forwarding is working (might be a workaround while DH deals with your issue)?

The answers to some of those questions would go a long way to helping narrow down the problem, getting you a temporary workaround in place, or even helping identify the problem for the DreamHost techs.

At any rate, if there is anything anyone here can do to try to help you, let us know, ok?

--rlparker

Thanks Jessey and Parker. About the tickets, yes, I have filled many of them , and all I got was a reply that the general problems with emails were fixed.

About the specifics, I have 211 emails at dreamhost. A good part of of them is working, some cannot acess the webmail, but the 6 ones created since monday ( which were transfer from another hosting service, therefore emails people expect to have working back immediattly ) are not acessing the webmail, not receiving messages ( that bounce back as únknown user' ) not working on email clients ( either imap or pop ) but acessing the mailboxes and correctly configured on the webpanel, where no problem is show. My emails server is Spacey

Can you log in to manage the email accounts at http://mailboxes.youremaildomain.com/ ?

Out of curiosity about your problem, I just created a new fully hosted email address (I, too, am on Spacey). mailboxes right now is working, but webmail continues to believe that my new address is an unknown user.

Of course, the account is only about ten minutes old, so it's possible the creation scripts are still running in my case. But I hadn't expected webmail and mailboxes to spawn to life at different times, so they're obviously a bit more loosely connected than I thought.

A few things come to mind:

1) As hard as it may be, and as frustrating as it cam be, you are
just now right about at 24 hours since you started experiencing the problem. At this point, filing "many" support tickets is probably not all that productive except to the degree that it provides additional information to the tech about specifics. Normally DreamHost is much faster, but they only represent that they will *try* to respond to support requests within 24 hours, so as difficult as it is, some patience is probably in order.

2) Even though I have no idea why this is the case, I have noticed anecdotally that the single most unpredictable experience I have had on DreamHost is the amount of time it takes to create and activate a new user and mailbox. I've had it happen almost instantly, and I have had it take over 24 hours on *many* occasions. I assume that the control panel collects the information for subsequent batch processing, and that some times that processing is faster than other times.

3) I have seen that not all aspects of email service "go live" at the same time. POP3 may often work before IMAP/webmail, and sometimes one will work when the other will not int he period immediateloy following creation.

3) While there is no indication of a spacy cluster problem, Tuesday is traditionally when DreamHost rolls out changes to their backend codebase. If you note yesterday's newsletter (it's already on the wiki if yours has not found it's way through the mail queue yet), there were some changes to the way email users/accounts were created. I have no way of knowing if any of this could have a bearing on any new email addresses that might have been in the queue to be created when the changes were rolled out. I suspect it is possible that some of them might have incompletely created as batches may have been interrupted. If this was the case, they may need some time to sort it.

I have no idea whether any of that has a bearing on your situation, but I think it might, and if that is the case, since you have already filed the support tickets, I don't know what else you can do at this point except to hope they can get it resolved as soon as possible.

One thing I know will not help, it being upset about it .. the stress is bad for you!

I really do hope they can get everything in order for you quickly.

--rlparker

Well Alpicola, for me mailboxes never ceased to work, it is actually working withing a couple of minutes after a new email is created. Webmail and pop3, for me, have not worked at all since monday for new accounts. If it gets to work in your case, let me know, it could help me to find what else I can try.

Well, I still don't have webmail access yet, but I did notice something interesting. Under Mail -> Manage Email, it lists the new mailbox along with the "creation pending" indicator, which presumably means that their email box creation robot knows I still need to get that mailbox created. If you still have the indicator too, it could be a sign that things are just being really slow with mailbox creation, but that at least you're still in the system.

Of course, at this point, it looks like this is a known issue after all. Seems they updated their status post title since we last looked at it over in your other thread, since I could have sworn (and the permalink url tends to confirm) that it was only talking about Spunky before.

I suppose that helps to explain why support hasn't emailed you back yet, too. I take this to mean that they're to busy fixing the problem to spend time writing emails saying that they're trying to fix the problem

I noticed that yesterday as well, but it seems the indication stays there for a while and then disappears, not necessarily with things working. In my case , they don't so far.

About their answers, it is clear now that they found out there is a problem, and also good to know the other customers affected are pressuring them.

Unfortunately, the 21 hours to solve the problem so far would be too much per se, but the truth is I have been experiencing this same problem since monday afternoon, which means it started 48 hours ago, they just took 24 of them to acknowledge it.