When we moved to the new hosting center we had pretty strict rules in our new firewall. Some people did not like that we did not allow pings to pop.runbox.com and smtp.runbox.com and by popular demand we have now turned it on again.
By popular request we’ve now doubled the weekly bandwidth quota from 2.5 GB to 5 GB for regular subscription accounts. Hopefully this helps especially the IMAP users that have been having problems, but please let us know if you’re still reaching the quota.
These are exciting times at Runbox: We will be moving our entire email server park to a brand new, state of the art hosting facility provided by Linpro. Linpro is Norway’s leading provider of open source and Linux based services, and is the same company that has managed Runbox’ servers since we started in 1999.
We believe this move will improve the reliability and uptime of Runbox and facilitate further development of our services, as both hosting services and server maintenance will be provided by the same organization.
Once the relocation is complete we’re planning to replace many of our existing servers with new hardware, and we already have several new servers waiting to be installed in the new data center.
The relocation will occur Thursday December 4 between approximately 9 and 13 CET (3 AM and 7 AM EST).
We will complete the operation as quickly and safely as possible but it will unfortunately entail some downtime (estimated 4-5 hours) affecting all our users.
While the service is inaccessible incoming email will normally be queued on the sending servers, but users of mailing list services such as Yahoo Groups might want to pause those.
We hope to provide outgoing email delivery while the main service is inaccessible.
The Runbox Web Hosting services will not be affected as they are hosted in a different location. All web sites hosted with Runbox will continue to work as normal.
We will update our Service Status section with more information when it becomes available:
http://doc.runbox.com/twiki/bin/view/RunboxInfo/ServiceStatus
Update
The relocation went well and we’re properly installed in our new data center. You can see pictures from the move here: http://doc.runbox.com/twiki/bin/view/RunboxInfo/NewDataCenter
We have acquired and deployed a new, powerful server dedicated to scanning incoming email for spam. This should in itself make the spam filtering more efficient, and will enable us to run more resource intensive tests and potentially catch more spam.
The new server has also relieved our MX (mail exchanger) servers of this task, thereby improving email delivery performance and allowing incoming messages to be processed more quickly.
Our new IMAP server is in its final stages of testing, and can be accessed on imap.runbox.com port 1143 until full deployment. For those who have been testing our alternative, Dbmail-based server on the same port: Your email client might reload folders and messages when accessing the new server for the first time.
Our hosting provider has unexpectedly scheduled emergency reparation of a backup power supply tonight (12.03.2008), causing downtime for the Runbox service. The outage will occur from approximately 24:00 CET (6 PM EST) tonight, and will last from 30 minutes up to 2 hours, according to our ISP.
We’re working with our maintenance personnel to minimize the downtime and its effects as much as possible. No email will be lost, as incoming email should be queued on the sending servers while ours are unresponsive. (more…)
Verizon’s vtext.com and vzwpix.com domains are no longer blocking emails sent from runbox, as of March 3, 2008.
After several requests we have now increased the number of aliases available to all subscribed accounts with 10. This means that all non-trial accounts now have 20 aliases available, or more if the user has purchased additional aliases in the past.
Today we have successfully deployed a new, powerful database server that forms the new “heart” of the Runbox system. This has substantially improved the overall performance of the service and re-establishes Runbox as a professional, efficient email hosting service. We hope you notice it too! 
Runbox Chat is an instant messaging service accessible directly from your browser, allowing you to communicate in real-time with friends, colleagues, and associates on any other chat network.There’s no software to download or install to use Runbox Chat, and it’s compatible with all major chat networks such as Google Talk, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, ICQ, and IRC.
Please see the Chat help page for more information, or just click Chat in the main menu.