Is webmail.spamcop.net down? I'm getting a blank page when I try to access it; and have been for the last several hours.

It's working for me, at 11:23 MST (2:23 PM EDT).

DT

And I am not having any issues getting to http://webmail.spamcop.net/ or https://webmail.spamcop.net/ either. 14:37 EDT

A server being 'down' would generally result in a 404 - Page not Found type error (actual verbiage is dependent on a whole lot of little [configuration] details)

Getting a 'blank page' tends to suggest that there's a traffic and/or handshaking issue between your computer and the targeted server .. or an issue with the browser itself.

Clear Broswer Cache and History
Shut-down and restart the Browser
Attempt a Trace-Route to webmail.spamcop.net (actual command spelling & syntax depends on what OS and tool-sets are in use)

I am getting a database error when I attempt to log into webmail. In addition, I am unable to access email via IMAP. The error I am receiving is as follows:
A fatal error has occurred
Could not connect to database for SQL SessionHandler.
Details have been logged for the administrator.

I am getting the same error.

Moderator Edit: Extracted from the Lounge Forum section, move and merged into this ecisting Topic/Discussion. PM sent to advise.

today, 5 pm EST, SpamCop mail is down.

Attempting to log in returns this error:

> A fatal error has occurred
> Could not connect to database for SQL SessionHandler.
> Details have been logged for the administrator.

No place else to ask.

Any news on this?

http://webmail.spamcop.net/ is working, but slow. But login on webmail.spamcop.net is not working:
"A fatal error has occurred
Could not connect to database for SQL SessionHandler.
Details have been logged for the administrator."

http://mailsc.spamcop.net/reportheld?action=heldlog is not working:
"Cannot log into IMAP mailserver as spamtrap[at]spamcop.net"

However, IMAP access in my e-mail program is working.

Although I'd believe that various alarms should be going off, and between JT/Trevor, it shouldn't take that long to catch/repair .. it is Frisay night here in the U.S. I was just getting ready to head uptown for a "downtown stroll" .. some bit of celebration for the seasons by the stores on Main Street ....

Dropped a note on JT's service .. perhaps more immediate than the e-mail he's no doubt received already.

It's not just webmail, I'm using IMAP and haven't gotten mail in a few hours. Just tested 3 messages from various sources to make sure.

Me too.

Yeah, webmail is down... getting the same error, and also not getting any of my POP mail either...

Webmail no bueno in Texas.

In Montreal ... I'm also getting the following comments:

A fatal error has occurred
Could not connect to database for SQL SessionHandler.
Details have been logged for the administrator.

6:40pm...
I cannot get in on web mail, nor can I pop using Eudora

Then they obviously know about it. The servers must have broken down...again.

Same fatal error in NYC at 704pm EST.

Seems to be fixed for me now. Near London UK.

Malcolm

...or NOT received, assuming that people were sending to a "spamcop.net" address. Really glad that you "paged" him, Wazoo, or we might not be back online now. (everything just came back up, BTW). These forums were unreachable as well, so I'm a bit puzzled about the posting activity. EVERYTHING in Georgia was down for hours, it would seem. No explanation posted on the mail login page yet.

DT

Everything seems OK now.

David: I was here off/on throughout the "outage". I also saw the webmail issue, and my Treo was getting errors on IMAP, but Windows Live Mail was able to access IMAP many times seeing new messages since 5PM EST and the newsgroups were also working for me. Can not concur with the "EVERYTHING in Georgia" comment.

I'm sure you were haveing problems, but others were not.

As posted on the SpamCop E-mail System News page

I'm assuming you saw the other reports, both here and in the ng, and the official notice of connectivity failures, so I think we can take the quotes off of "outage." I was expecting some very important email this evening, so during the datacenter problems, I had to re-route my email forwarding around SpamCop, as I had no way of knowing if anyone was either aware of the problem or going to fix it -- it would be good if there were someplace where emergency outage notices could be posted that's NOT hosted in the same datacenter as the mail servers, this forum, and SpamCop's NNTP server.


That's the way things were behaving from this part of the Internet. Didn't look to be DNS related here, as all host names were resolving....just couldn't get ANY of the various servers to respond. However, I think there are complexities in the DNS used by SpamCop that go beyond a "garden-variety" system, and that might explain our differing experiences.

DT

Those thoughts and sentiments actually had me giggling a bit ... a few flashbacks involved ...

For starters, there is an 'alternate' locaion at present for outages on JT's side of the house .... the infamous www.spamcop.net web-page. However, .... JT no longer has access to those servers. For whatever reason, no one that does have access has touched tha page in a long while .. noting the line;

News: (Last Modified: Saturday, April 12, 2008 10:37:39 PM -0500) (Email-account news)

There exists much news since April 12, 2008.

In the past, one could point to the known paid staff, but .. it's hard to tell these days whether they still actually have access anymore themselves. (Again, pointing to the above 'status' line.)

My flashbacks go back to the days of Julian owned/leased servers ... and me making the same comments and even offering to host that off-site location for the status advisories. Thinking about going ahead and doing somethng like that today still leaves me thinking it'd be a lost cause. Looking at today's newsgroup traffic, the Forum traffic, the initial thought would be "who'd remember yet another 'strange' non-associated URL" to go to for a status check ... and of course wondering if that status listing was actually valid, when would it be next updated, etc., etc., etc.

Sorry I was not explicit... the "outage" I was discussing was for the newsgroups and forum, not the email for which was confirmed. There are a number of posts on the newsgroups from the couple of hours just before your post that things were back, mostly discussing the email outage.

I can not see where an inability for their servers to reach outside servers would have affected your access to both of these services which are driven by the client end connecting into their servers (Our servers were mostly reachable) but you must have been in an area not served by the "mostly".

Good analysis, Wazoo...SpamCop.net is not being maintained properly, which is infortunate. It would be the ideal place for posting a system status issue regarding SpamCop Mail, Forum, etc., but that will probably never happen....it's just too logical.

Regarding the newsgroups....I discovered that just ".help" is apparently mirrored (?) to a GoogleGroups-accessible Usenet server:

http://groups.google.com/group/spamcop.hel...s?hl=en&lnk

When everything was inaccessible from here, I found that resource and posted to it, but then suddenly realized that I had done so from my "day job" identity, potentially exposing my work email address to harvesting, so I issued a cancel. The message showed up in the JT-hosted-NNTP version of the group, and the cancel shows up in "control.cancel" so I'm hoping that little long-term harm was done to the spam exposure of my work address.

p.s. - Steven -- I was composing this while you posted....would you please edit out my ".help" post from your CODE section? Trying to protect that address, and that doesn't help!

DT

Done. Actually pulled out all of the email addresses as they are really not needed. Sorry.

Thanks. As for why my experience was different here...that's hard to say. If it were only a DNS issue, then my browser shouldn't have been able to resolve the addresses, and the error messages should have reflected that. During the outage, I also attempted command-line email deliveries to the MX servers, but I did so from a web-hosting box on the East coast, and those attempts also timed out, indicating not DNS issues, but actual connectivity issues.

DT

In fact, the problem is much stranger and obscure than that.

We have very good DNS. spamcop.net DNS is handled by Akamai globally. cesmail.net DNS is handled by a set of four different nameservers, in four datacenters, in both North America and Europe. There was no problem with the internet at large reaching our DNS.

The real problem was with our servers internally reaching these nameservers. We use them ourselves to resolve names used internally within the system. We have resolving cache nameservers but they ultimately look up our names on the same servers you guys do. For a time Friday evening, our caches couldn't get to our own nameservers and couldn't look up IP addresses, like the IP address of the database server.

We've been informed now that upstream from our data center, one provider had problems reaching a broken connection to Level3. Apparently they were accepting traffic but it was disappearing. The upstreams went back and forth for a while before our data center did an emergency failover and took all traffic away from those guys. At that point, the problem instantly went away.

My guess is that inbound traffic came in a different route and that reply packets went back out that route. So, we were mostly reachable. However, transactions that we initiated (like DNS queries) mostly went out that broken route.

Anyway, this all happened several layers upstream of us so I don't have any more visibility into the problem. This is probably about all the info I'll ever get and I wasn't able to do any real network debugging while it was going on.

JT

Thanks for the details, JT. Thankfully, the "disturbance in the force" was pretty short-lived.

DT