Most of my customers are using GFI’s MaxMail solution to provide virus and spam filtering, as well as email continuity and archiving.

Today, a customer called to report issues with sending and receiving emails. I was able to successfully connect to the server remotely, but incoming and outgoing email seemed to be at a stand still, but with no warnings or errors. I rebooted Exchange on this SBS 2008 server, with no improvement.

I then used MXToolBox to check out the status of the domain and test SMTP delivery. Voila! It reported an error in connecting to GFI’s intermediate IP addresses!

I then called GFI Support, and the pre-recorded message informed me that I was not the only one with this issue. I also learned that GFI does have a specific URL for Blog status monitoring of GFI MAX: http://status.gfimax.com

And here is what they are reporting:

Our engineers have been systematically assessing all of the centralized components of our service in North America, including our configuration databases, the greylisting service, our various spam and virus filtering engines, network responsiveness between datacenters, and other elements that could be causing the very slow response times of our filters.

The likely culprit from our testing is the centralized asset storage servers, which are responding more slowly than usual by nearly an order of magnitude. The engineers are investigating this in detail to determine what is causing multiple asset stores in multiple datacenters to be so affected.