tigertech-announce Mailing List: Scheduled Maintenance for E-Mail on Sunday, November 14

[Tiger Technologies (support]

Tiger Technologies will be performing scheduled maintenance on our mail 
system from 12:01 AM to 2:00 AM Pacific time this Sunday, November 14 
(3:01 AM to 5:00 AM Eastern time, 0801-1000 UTC).

During that two hour period, it will not be possible to read incoming 
e-mail or send outgoing mail through our servers. Full e-mail access will 
be available after 2:00 AM Pacific time, and no incoming e-mail will be 
lost. Web sites will not be affected.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause; we have scheduled this 
maintenance period during a time when it will affect the least number of 
people.

The rest of this message describes a technical change in how e-mail is 
stored on our servers. If you are forwarding your mail to another ISP 
(such as AOL, Yahoo, or Hotmail), or reading your incoming mail using our 
Webmail system or a mail program on your computer (such as Outlook, 
Outlook Express, Eudora, or Mail.app), this change does not affect you, 
and you can ignore the rest of this message.


----- A Technical Change In How We Store E-Mail -----------------------

We should emphasize again that few, if any, of our customers will need 
the information below. Only customers who might be using a non-standard 
method to access their e-mail using server software they have installed 
themselves will need this information.

POP mailbox e-mail messages are currently stored as individual files in a 
directory named "mailstore" on your Web server. This arrangement has 
theoretically allowed advanced users to create scripts that manipulate 
those mail files directly through the file system (although we have never 
suggested that anyone do this) or by sending POP/IMAP mail commands to 
"localhost".

Beginning November 14, POP mailbox e-mail will no longer be stored on the 
same server that handles your Web site; it will be stored on different 
servers dedicated to mail handling. This change will reduce the disk 
read/write load on our Web servers and lead to increased reliability and 
speed.

Because of this change, if you have created a script to manipulate the 
raw mail files in your mailstore directory, that script will no longer 
work properly. You should convert the script to instead use normal 
POP/IMAP mail commands to manipulate incoming mail.

If you have a script that sends POP/IMAP mail commands to "localhost", 
you should change your script to connect to "mail.tigertech.net" instead 
(you can make this change now, as mail.tigertech.net is a virtual 
hostname that automatically connects your client to the right server for 
your mail).

Note that these changes only affect incoming mail. If you have a script 
that sends outgoing mail through the "sendmail" program, or delivers mail 
to "localhost", that script will still work without any changes.

Please let us know if you have any questions. Thank you for your support!

-- 
Tiger Technologies