Fri Nov 20 07:40 EST 2015

We are sorry! Safe-mail is not ready yet.

Safe-mail.net is down for critical maintainance.

During the many (and long) days since the crash, we have been experiencing the wider version of Murphy's law: Anything that can go wrong, will — at the worst possible moment.

We know that apologies will not change anything, so in addition to our sincere apologies we are taking actions to make the system better.
We are now in the final stages of putting everything together and hope Safe-mail.net will be available again not later then Tuesday, the 24th of November.
This will be a completely new system - new equipment, new operating system and recompiled software with small modifications to match the new environment. We hope the renewed configuration will be more stable than the previous one.
There will be other changes, mainly: no self-registration and a separate system for Premium users.
During the coming weeks we will continue to work intensively on different aspect of the system. After that period, we intend to dedicate one hour of every week to maintenance. During that hour user sign-in will be disabled, although during most of maintenance period the system will be up and running. Details will be announced soon.
We expect several issues:
1. Because of the long down time we expect a high rate of password lost. Normally, we can't help in such situations, but at this time we will do whatever is possible to help, mainly Premium users. Details will be published soon.
2. As a result of the extensive cleanup in the list of users, we expect that some innocent users were removed inadvertently. We kept ALL data and will publish a procedure for recovering missing accounts.

Sat Nov 7 15:15 EST 2015

We are very sorry. The current safe-mail service downtime is a major event, we should learn from it and come out with a much better service for our loyal users.
About 18 month ago we have switched our hosting company as we felt that our previous hosting service was not as good as we would like it to be.
During the last year we have suffered from an increasing level of abuse and attacks of many types. Eventually we had to stop automatic self-registration and require a mail request to open a free account.
For several months we are in the process of transferring users' data to new and better equipment, as a result about 90% of our users will not lose any data. The rest may suffer a minimal loss of messages sent or received just before the crash (hours up to a few days).
During this downtime we have already replaced most of our hardware and installed a new version of the operating system.
The current downtime forced us to execute the system overhaul earlier than planned.
We think that this is not good enough.
As soon as the system is functioning, we intend to start building a separate system dedicated to our Premium users.
This system will have full redundancy and could continue working even if the Free sub-system will need to shut down.

Wed Nov 4 03:20 EST 2015

  1. The Safe-mail.net system suffered a major storage hardware crash.
    Much of the Safe-mail.net system is now renewed. Most of the users' data was not affected by the crash, as we already moved it to a new system during the last few months.
    Once the system is functioning again, most of the hardware (and operating system) will be new.

  2. We salvaged additional data from the crashed storage.
    About 8% of users' data need to be recovered from the Backup system. Accounts that will be restored from the Backup system may loose the last few hours of activity before the crash.

  3. The Safe-mail.net system suffered a major storage hardware crash.
    About 80% of user's data is not affected by the crash, as we already moved it to a new system during the last few months.
    The rest is either to be salvaged from the crashed storage, or will be restored from the Backup system.

  4. At this time we will permanently remove about 250,000 user accounts that were involved in activity which violates the Safe-mail.net Agreement and policy.
    Note: Only those who violate our policy will be deleted. Most accounts are not affected.

  5. Free web based registration to Safe-mail.net will not be available.
    Free accounts will be opened by sending a request to Safe-mail.net.

  6. In the near future, separate subsystems will be used for Free and Premium accounts.
    This will enable better service and even enable shutdown of the Free subsystem without affecting the Premium users.

Further information will be published.