Author Archive for Mads Petersen

The Future of Kolab Now: Part V

Posted on: August 26th, 2020 by

For a long time we planned to migrate user data and move over to the new account management this coming weekend (29/30 of August, 2020). Many cogs were spinning and we worked hard. Our application worked well in our test environment. Much effort went into assuring that the new payment methodology and preparations for upcoming improvements worked well and  that your data really could get migrated without troubles. As we moved into the transition phase however we realized that the preparation and deployment into the production environment was going to need a few more iterations of innovation. We have this thing with what we do: We do it right, or we do not do it at all!

Hence we decided to move the release day back a week – into September.

More information to come about that very soon.

The Future of Kolab Now: Part II

Posted on: July 12th, 2020 by

Kolab Now is a paid online service, where users can pay for their subscription and used resources via credit card, PayPal, bank transfer (and in the future, bitcoin). It is the task of a centerpiece module called the Hosted Kolab Customer Control Panel (HKCCP) to manage and administer the subscriptions and payments (among other tasks).

Over the years we have received feedback from users with constructive, honest criticism about the level of flexibility in the payment system. Users have wanted greater control of when to pay, and the actual services and resources paid for. As we always strive to improve the user experience, we listened and made accommodating changes to the payment system in the new updated HKCCP.

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Long Live the web page..

Posted on: December 5th, 2019 by

You may have seen that we had some issues with our website front page ‘https://kolabnow.com/’ this afternoon, and that it was on and off a few times.

Yes! We did some updates on the themes and color pallets. We had the new update up for a short while, but found out that our designer had ‘made a boo boo’. It took a little time to fix it and get the colors right, but everything is ok up and running again now.

During this update we did not touch the actual service ‘https://kolabnow.com/apps’ or anything even close to the data – only the front page ‘web blah’. If you were just reading your mail and going about using the service, then everything was just working as it should. Chances are, that you did not experience any issue at all.

If you were looking for anything on the front page at exactly that moment where we were moving things around, then we apologize for the inconvenience.

 

DISCLAIMER: No bits died or were hurt during this update.

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Incident Report: Double trouble..

Posted on: October 28th, 2019 by

Late Sunday night at 21:31 CET we were alarmed by lost connections. Symptoms seemed to point to a networking issue in the datacenter. Our datacenter provider was alerted, we sent our own emergency team onsite to assist in resolving the issue, and to deal with any fallout.

A faulty firewall was recovered, and mail started flowing again at around 00:10. Our ops team is now investigating why the firewalls didn’t fail over as they are configured to do in such situation.

At about 04:15, long after the system had recovered from the firewall issue, one system started to throw disk errors, which was leading to some users not being able to access the data in their folders. As this was a separate issue, the symptoms were only discovered at around 06:45, as it was assumed to be recovery issues from the previous outage. As soon as the disk error issue was realized, it was fixed and recovered. Connection to data was available again for all users at 07:10.

Where as we are still investigating the root cause for both of these issues, we can state, that no data was at risk at any time during the events.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Another iPhone ‘LIST-STATUS’ issue [FIXED]

Posted on: February 15th, 2019 by

In the beginning of the week we got a list of reports from users of iPhone connected via IMAP. These users reported that they were unable to list their mail folders. You can read about this issue in a previous blog post on this blog.

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Announcing Service Window: Datacenter maintenance..

Posted on: February 15th, 2019 by

Our local Swiss datacenter and internet provider is a great, professional and stable provider of data connectivity and datacenter services. These services however demands updates of infrastructure, and such maintenance work is happening in a planned service window the night between Saturday 23.02.2019 and Sunday 24.02.2019.

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Another iPhone ‘LIST-STATUS’ issue..

Posted on: February 13th, 2019 by

A little more than a year ago, we found and worked around an issue that caused iPhone users to have problems with IMAP connections to Kolab Now. The issue made it problematic for such users to list and read their IMAP folders.

Back then we worked around the issue by suppressing the LIST-STATUS option for IMAP connections, which made everything work for a while.

This week we again started getting a number of reports about similar symptoms from iPhone users, and we of course investigated those reports as fast and appropriate as we always do.

We quickly found, that a change was made in January to fix an issue for  Outlook users, and that one part of that change was – you guessed it – to undo the suppression of LIST-STATUS. Hence, IMAP connecting iPhone users were getting right back into almost the same situation that they were in a year ago.

Where as we have found the root cause of the issue, we seem to be in a catch 22, where we can accommodate Outlook users or iPhone users connecting via IMAP. Of course we are working on a fix that can make it possible to accommodate both groups of users. Updates and news about the issue will be posted here in this blog.

If you need to read mail and list mailfolders on your iPhone before we have fixed the issue, there are at the moment two workarounds:

  • You can change your iPhone to connect via ActiveSync. This will require that you have Mobile Connectivity enabled in your subscription.
  • You can set your web client to use the new responsive skin, and then open the web client in a browser on your iPhone.

Should you have any questions or concerns in this context, then please contact Support.

The Kolab Now Team thank you up front for your patience.

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Outlook and return options to LSUB

Posted on: January 9th, 2019 by

A while back, users started to experience issues with IMAP LIST Extension for Special-Use Mailboxes. This to a level where a decision was made to temporarily suspend supporting Special-Use at Kolab Now.

Lately we have found ways to get around the problems that were present back then, and over the change of the year we introduced an update that, among other great improvements, contained these solutions and re-enabled the Special-Use.

Unfortunately, meanwhile Microsoft has also updated Outlook, and their update has changed the return options that Outlook is using with the LSUB command on the IMAP server.

This has caused issues for some users, who connect Outlook to Kolab Now via IMAP. Those users are suddenly not able to see some of their folders and mails in Outlook. The folders are perfectly visible in the web client and in other IMAP clients like mobile clients, Mac Mail and Thunderbird.

While the RFC compliance issue (the LSUB command does not accept a client specifying RETURN options) certainly has been made visible by Microsoft changing the behavior of Outlook, inversely Kolab Now providing an update to the benefit of all other clients has suddenly shown the related Outlook behavior to be faulty.

The root cause of the issue can be narrowed down to the expectations from Cyrus IMAP while parsing the LSUB command. Besides filing an upstream ticket, Kolab Systems has engaged in this issue and is contributing a fix to the Cyrus IMAP code. This fix is now going through test and QA, and should be ready to be deployed to Kolab Now soon.

If you are one of the users, who has problems because you are connecting Outlook to Kolab Now via IMAP, then you can work around the issue by – either using another IMAP client – or by connecting your Outlook to Kolab Now via ActiveSync, until the fix for Cyrus IMAP is ready and deployed.

If you have any questions or concerns in this context, then please contact support@kolabnow.com.

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A New Gregorian Year, A New Responsive Skin

Posted on: December 29th, 2018 by

The change of the year is always a good opportunity to look back at what has happened, and to make changes for the future. Earlier we have been writing about the work put into the Responsive skin (elastic skin) and it’s now time to enjoy the result we got out of the work that was done.

A version of a responsive skin was available on beta.kolabnow.com/apps for a while, but now it has finally passed QA, and is made available for all Kolab Now users.

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Do not click the link..

Posted on: December 28th, 2018 by

A phishing mail has been sent to some Kolab Now customers. Our Support team was alerted by observant and attentive users, and our Operations team was able to take preventive action before the mail was spread more widely.> Continue Reading

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