We will be making some changes to our IMAP/POP3 servers starting at 12:00 noon on Tuesday 4th March, as part of our ongoing plan to increase capacity and reslience.

First Stage - no impact

The first stage will be to redirect the imap.gradwell.net and pop3.gradwell.net hostnames, to our new load balancer. Initially, this will then forward traffic back to our current IMAP servers, but a moderate increase in load balancing.

Customers should not notice any change in service - if you do experience a problem with IMAP or webmail, please contact our support team

Second Stage - Individual Mailbox Restructuring

The second stage will then involve changing the structure of each mailbox, so that it uses a new cluster of IMAP servers, which use newer software. Once we have switched to our new load balancer we will be able to migrate each mailbox one-at-a-time.

Our new IMAP cluster is operating on our VMware infrastructure, using 5 IMAP servers in a fully load balanced configuration. Additionally, it uses new software which has much better indexing and support for larger email boxes.

Update - 8th May 2008
All the above work is complete. Customers should make sure their IMAP email clients are set to use pop3.gradwell.net as the IMAP server.