New ExchangeDefender Router Code

I guess we will never learn if the support team could kick developer teams ass.

Earlier today we rolled out the new ExchangeDefender code to a select* group of users. This new software is intended to adjust connection timeouts during peak hours and log timeouts so it can be reported.

One of the more frustrating things we have is that a lot of people simply do not have a network with enough capacity to run a mail server. Without limits in place we find sites that at random times get congested and only accept the smallest of messages. Bigger pieces, particularly those with attachments, can get delayed from a few minutes to a few hours. This is a rare issue but it creates an insane amount of support requests.

Recently we started extending connection timeouts on per-IP basis but I’d rather throw alerts and advise clients to upgrade their connections (or suffer timeouts and delays).

Now if we get over 30 seconds of inactivity the message is flushed to a queue with a 90 second timeout. If it’s more than that, it will be switched to a queue with life of 180 second timeout.

Logging of this activity will help us plot the timeouts on per-host basis so we can have a model for each client that reports an error. It takes far too much time to go through each queue to inspect each message, now we can have full host reputation reporting to justify the recommendation they get more bandwidth.

Some experimental code ought to improve things. We’ll know tomorrow.

* “Hey wait a minute, I am not paying you to run experimental software on my business email.” – I know and I have great news, we’re only using this on the delinquent accounts for people that are more than 30 days out. 🙂 So if you complain, expect to talk to the billing person first 🙂