Issue 38: Dyn Inc. Launches DNSCog

March 10, 2009

DNSCog Now Available

DNSCog free DNS report tool

In the last week of March, Dynamic Network Services Inc. (Dyn Inc.) launched its new free DNS report and diagnostics tools, DNSCog. DNSCog is a suite of helpful, comprehensive online utilities such as:

While still in beta, we hope to continually improve DNSCog to ensure our customers and the Internet as a whole have free, easily accessible and helpful diagnostics tools to let them make the most of their DNS services. Click here to start using DNSCog!

MailHop

Over the past month or so, some customers have experienced issues with our MailHop Relay and MailHop Forward services. We've heard from customers through email, phone, and discussions on the community forum, and would like to take this time to clarify the issues.

  1. On Feb 27, we had a status posting that addressed the delays in email delivering some customers were reporting. Although it took longer than we’d like, we were able to correct this issue within about a week. We are now running completely on the newly configured platform, and the intermittent delays that people were experiencing should no longer be an issue.

  2. As our status posting on March 12 noted, we received a number of calls from customers regarding the MailHop Relay service regarding issues in receiving mail. In each case, the cause had been outdated whitelist settings at the customers' servers. If you are experiencing issues receiving mail as well, make sure that you update your whitelist to include all of the ranges listed here. This list was updated back in August, and we sent an email notification to all of our MailHop Relay customers at that time, so many of you should already be up-to-date.

  3. Also around March 12, we began hearing that certain MailHop Forward customers were experiencing delays in mail forwarded to att.net, yahoo.com and gmail.com. Because we were using new IP addresses to send the mail, some providers began greylisting the delivery of these messages.. It’s important to realize that we were receiving the mail and forwarding it onto the addresses that our customers specified, but the destination mail providers were choosing not to accept the mail.

    Unfortunately, the solution to this is not as simple as picking up the phone and explaining the situation. Our IP addresses had been whitelisted before, but these providers require all correspondence to be done via email, and their response time is typically 72 hours. As of today, these issues seem to be resolved with yahoo.com and gmail.com, and while att.net has been less than responsive to our emails, they have likewise fixed the problems on their end.

  4. At approximately 10am EDT on March 23, our mx1.mailhop.org cluster for MailHop Forward and Relay fell victim to a very large spam attack, which consumed most of the available resources to process new e-mail in a timely manner. In response, our Operations team tracked down the source of the spam to block it, and has installed additional servers to handle the increased influx of new messages. At this time, we believe all systems are working normally and the new servers are running like a charm. We sincerely apologize any delays experienced, and can assure you we.re taking steps to prevent it from happening again.

Although many providers will claim to have a dedication to excellence, we really live that promise out to our customers. During the past month our operations team has been working many late nights fixing the issues our customers have experienced, bringing new servers online and mitigating spam attacks. While these issues were not foreseeable, we do apologize for the inconveniences they have caused, and assure you that there have been lessons learned from these situations to help prevent them from happening in the future.

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