A little background to the problem

Anyone that uses the MessageLabs service will know that we have been attempting to have some level of reasonable dialogue with them about changes they made to their infrastructure some time back in order to handle the deluge of Spam that was hitting their servers.

Unlike most of their competitors that either added more capacity or added more sophisticated front-end filtering MessageLabs placed a blanket block on any email directed to any server other than the primary server.  They also appeared to have removed the actual physical servers that were defined (and still are defined) as the fail-over email servers within a cluster of servers.

So when Sitemorse attempted to check that all the defined email servers were present, defined correctly and configured correctly we would get bounced.  Which resulted in us reporting errors for those email servers.  This resulted in some organisation's scores being impacted which upset several people as it was a problem they could do nothing to affect.

We have given up on being able to engage in any sensible dialogue with MessageLabs and so, with the advent of the updated email service that we introduced last week, we have changed the way that we designate these types of errors.

The idea behind our scoring regime is to penalise sites that have errors which WILL impact users of the site (broken links, failing email addresses etc) more severely than than sites with errors that MAY impact users (non-compliant HTML, missing Metadata etc).  We have reassessed some of our tests and recategorised them.  Some have a higher severity level and some have been lowered.  See my posting on the subject here http://blog.sitemorse.com/2009/01/some-tests-have-moved-between.html

The solution

We have reclassified the email server errors to have a lower severity level - because if a secondary or fail-over email server gives a problem email will still be being received by the primary email server so there is no immediate impact on a user of the site, this is just a warning of the potential problem. This means that the impact on a site's score is greatly reduced.

Hopefully this will resolve the issue that some of our users had with this problem.

If you have any questions on this please don't hesitate to contact me on gevans@sitemorse.com