Delayed email delivery

Some users (myself included) have experienced delayed email delivery, ranging from hours to days. It appears this is due to a number of spam attacks aimed at our domain. When this happens, Google temporarily suspends email originating from the attacking IP address until the attack is stopped. 

As a brief historical context, email was never designed to be an instant form of communication. By design, mail servers are set to try to deliver email, and if they cannot, try again hours later, until a certain amount of time (the old default was two days) before giving up and sending a failure notice back to the sender. So although we have become accustomed to instantaneous delivery, it is not really designed that way.

I'll post other updates on this topic to this blog.

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Updates: SPAM attacks

Action: block '571 spam source blocked'
Source: 182.72.181.33
Time: 2014/03/11 06:41:15 GMT

Action: block '571 spam source blocked'
Source: 186.118.195.40
Time: 2014/03/08 01:04:44 GMT

Virus and spyware threat: "Statement of fees"

Some users have received an email message with a zip file attached. The subject is "statement of fees." Please do not open the file or forward to us. Just DELETE immediately. Here's a screen shot of the mail received:

 

 

Some indications that this is an attack:

• the return address is from a foreign domain (bradteal.com.au)
• wording is pretty vague and generalized, but implies some time-sensitive pressure "this will be posted today"
• you have no idea who "Cherry Sylvester" is