Bromley ICT Forum Blog

  Recently, some of our customers have experienced error messages when:

1.       Downloading emails from Digitalbrain into a third party email client such as Microsoft Outlook, via POP [Post Office Protocol].

2.      Using the Digitalbrain webmail interface itself.

The cause of these problems is an increased demand for connections to our email databases. When we reach a point at which we were unable to handle any more simultaneous connections to our email databases, our customers can experience:

1. A ‘server busy’ message from our POP3 service when using a 3rd party email client to download their mail (reported as a disconnection error by Microsoft Outlook).
2. A ‘read time out’ error when they use the Digitalbrain webmail service.

To resolve this situation we have made the following changes:

1. On 7^th November we increased the capacity of the servers handling POP session traffic to the maximum extent possible. The result of this was to increase the maximum number of simultaneous connections in order that the probability of a customer receiving the ‘server busy’ message was reduced. As a result of this change, emails could be downloaded using POP from Digitalbrain in a reasonably timely fashion, although customers did still regularly experience ‘server busy’ messages.
2. On 15^th November we amended our POP download process. As a result of this change customers now connect to our database for a far shorter time when they use POP to download emails. This allows us to process many more sessions. With effect from 16^th November, the result has been a dramatic reduction in POP failure error messages, in some cases to practically nil.

In addition we are working to increase capacity by bringing online more server resources to share the traffic onto our email databases. We expect these to come online next week. The extra server resources will allow us to increase the numbers of customers who can simultaneously connect to our email databases. This is designed to reduce the probability that users of Digitalbrain webmail will experience ‘read timeout’ errors, as well as also reducing still further the likelihood of errors during a POP download session.

Regards

LGfL Customer Support Team