DDoS Attacks – Summary of Events

Between November 4-6, Runbox experienced powerful DDoS attacks by a group calling themselves “Armada Collective”. Other security oriented email services such as ProtonMail, Hushmail, and Neomailbox were also attacked, as recently reported by Forbes.

The initial threats and attacks that attempted to extort money were withdrawn by the attackers on Saturday morning, when they offered an apology.

During the attacks we were focused on coordinating with our partners, putting in place countermeasures, and providing our customers with necessary information. Since the situation was unclear and evolved quickly, we decided to not publish any details that could inform the attackers in any way.

The situation is now under control and we are publishing this summary of the events as it may help shed light on what transpired against both Runbox and the other services that were attacked.

(more…)

Share:

Continue Reading →

DDoS Attacks on Runbox

Yesterday and today Runbox was subject to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. This was initiated by a group that have threatened that if Runbox does not pay them a large amount of money, further attacks will take place in the coming days.

We were able to successfully mitigate against the effects of both incidents. During the initial attack we were down for around 15 minutes before we could put a solution in place. Today our customers should not have noticed any effects of the attack.

We think the attacks might be scaled up in the coming days.

(more…)

Share:

Continue Reading →

“Denial of service” attack on Runbox

We had a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on our email services today, preventing some users from accessing our servers for a short time.

Together with our server management and hosting partners we mitigated the attack. There might be more attacks in the coming days, so please check our blog, support page or Twitter page for updates if you can’t access our email services.

Share:

Continue Reading →

Scheduled maintenance Oct 12, 2015

On Monday, October 12 at 0600 CEST we will replace an email storage unit, and our email services will unfortunately not be accessible while we switch servers.

The downtime will start at approximately 0600 CEST (0400 GMT,  0000 EDT) and last for 30-45 minutes.

Runbox will accept incoming email to your account during the downtime, and those messages will be delivered when the operation is complete. It will however not be possible to send email.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused, and recommend that you check your email before or after the scheduled maintenance window.

To find the local time where you are for this maintenance, please see the time conversion at timeanddate.com

Share:

Continue Reading →

SPF Record Change

After careful consideration we have decided to adopt a stricter policy with regards to SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records for our own Runbox domains.

Note: This does not affect domains owned by our customers.

What are SPF records?

SPF records are used as a way to determine if email addresses are being spoofed in sent mail. They allow domain administrators (Runbox in this case) to specify which servers are allowed to send email for the domains they control.

(more…)

Share:

Continue Reading →

Runbox is running faster

After doing some tuning to our central database yesterday we have been able to increase the speed of all our email services significantly.

This is especially noticeable when using the Webmail, but email clients using IMAP and POP should also be faster.

This was made possible because Runbox is a database accelerated email system, where all basic message data is stored in a central database. This means that our various services don’t have to open any actual files on the storage units to display folder contents. Only when a message is opened do the services access the message files themselves.

We’d be interested in hearing if Runbox is running faster for you. Meanwhile we’ll continue working to improve the performance of our services!

Share:

Continue Reading →

New IMAP Server Software

We are pleased to announce the official launch of our new IMAP server software.

We’ve been extensively testing and improving the new Dovecot-based software in an open beta phase for several months. We are now very happy with how it’s performing, and it resolves several issues with our current IMAP software (see below).

We will therefore be moving to the new software and will retire our existing Courier-based IMAP servers. Since the new software uses a more standardized configuration, all IMAP users will need to change their settings by December 1, 2015.

Note: If you have already changed your email client’s settings as part of the open beta phase you don’t need to do anything.

(more…)

Share:

Continue Reading →

Scheduled maintenance and downtime

Due to necessary reorganization of our email server infrastructure, all Runbox email services will be inaccessible for a short period on Monday 17.08 at around 06:00 CEST (04:00 GMT, 0:00 EDT).

The downtime should last less than 5 minutes.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Share:

Continue Reading →

New IMAP Server Software in Open Beta Test

We are pleased to announce the start of the Open Beta Testing Phase of our new Dovecot IMAP servers.

We are introducing new IMAP servers to resolve errors that have been experienced by many customers, to simplify the set up in email clients and to improve IMAP performance.

We expect that customers using Apple Mail (OS X) and the native Mail app (iOS) on iPhones and iPads will see the most benefit from our new servers, but performance and reliability will be improved for all customers.

Problems we believe will be resolved are:

  • Read/Unread synchronisation issues
  • Moving messages from one folder to another resulted in a copy in the new and old locations
  • Error messages of the kind “Cannot connect to server”
  • With iOS the native Mail app would fail to update and would continue to show a date in the past

At some future date the current servers will be retired, and all customers will need to use the new IMAP servers.

If you would like to switch to the new servers now, and take part in our Beta testing phase, please see the information on the Open Beta Phase page (the previous link now directs to the official launch details). Please note that although the software is already thoroughly tested and performing well, changes and disruptions may occur as we continue improving it.

If you have any questions about these changes, please contact Runbox Support.

 

Share:

Continue Reading →