Another year past and we needed to again refresh our certificates.
Happy New Year 2022
Ladies and Gentlemen,
another turbulent and exciting year, 2021, soon comes to an end!
We want to thank all y’all for your support, and for being or becoming a part of the Kolab Now family. We hope you enjoy and value our product and services the same way that we enjoy providing them.
As always, we like to improve, and for that we need your opinions. For things that you especially like or dislike, please feel free to send us your input to support@kolabnow.com. Feedback helps us to make Kolab Now even greater every day!
Are your friends and family already on Kolab Now? If not, here is a small gift for the holiday season:
New Kolab Now sign-ups (individual or group accounts) will receive a 22% discount for the duration of 6 months when signing up before the 31.12.2021 with the voucher code WELCOME2022.
Here is how it works step by step:
- Go to https://kolabnow.com/signup and choose individual or group account
- Enter your name and set an external e-mail address
- Receive the registration code
- Set your Kolab Now identity and enter the voucher code WELCOME2022
- Wait till your Mailbox is being created and start the magic!
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the Kolab Now team!
How Kolab Meet and integrated collaborative editing boosted my Christmas preparations
And.. its around the corner again – Christmas!
Every year it is a very special time for me and my family. The days get shorter, everyone slows down and reflects on the busy year at home with cups of tea and hot chocolate on the couch, covered in a warm blanket.
At the same time it means Christmas preparations. We are a big family with more than 56 members spread over different cities and countries, gathering each year on different locations to enjoy the Christmas days together. Now the cozy moments on the edge of the commencing winter start to get hectic. Dinner plans have to be made, wish lists to be exchanged and discussed, invitations & Christmas cards have to be designed.
Incident Report: Network Outage at Kolab Now
On Tuesday 2021-10-05, between 10:20 UTC and 10:40 UTC, a network issue kicked our firewalls off the grid, and Kolab Now was down. Our Operations team was on the case right away and could correct the issue instantly. As a result the downtime was very limited.
When the dust had settled, it turned out that one of our hypervisors had stopped one of its redundant storage blocks, as it was unavailable for too long, and a group ~ 20 users were unable to see their mails in the mail folders. Again our Operations team was reacting fast and could restore the connections to the redundant storage. Everything is back up and running for everyone now, and no data was in danger at any point through out the incident.
If you are one of the few users who had the problem after the down time, or if you experienced troubles during the outage around lunch time, then we truly apologize for the inconvenience that it caused.
If you have any questions or concerns in this context, please contact support.
Incident Report: Storage Outage at Kolab Now
On Monday, August 23rd 2021 at around 04:00 UTC, Kolab Now suffered a catastrophic outage related to its storage. This post will outline what happened, when it happened, and what is to happen.
Announcing Service Window: Improving Authentication
After much work we are now ready to switch over to a new authentication system based on laravel passport. The switch over will happen on Saturday, August 21st starting at 09:00 UTC. Short periods of downtime might occur, but we will of course keep it to a minimum.
Users can follow the status of the update via the Kolab Ops Twitter account. They can keep working and collaborating online as usual. Should you have any issues in this or any other context, then please contact Kolab Now Support.
(re-)Introducing Bank payments..
On Saturday, 31st of July 2021 we added a few features to Kolab Now during a service window. We already informed you about two of the features that were added; the user controlled Sender Preferred Framework (SPF) for group admin users, and the user controlled opt out of the greylist for users. What we failed to update you on was another added ‘new’ payment option: Bank transfers.
Announcing Service Window: Updates to Kolab..
This Saturday, 31st of July 2021 at 08:00 UTC, the Kolab Now operations team will perform an update of the Kolab dashboard software on the Kolab Now platform.
Announcing Service Window: Updates to Kolab..
This Saturday, 19th of June 2021 at 09:00 UTC, the Kolab Now operations team will perform an update of the Kolab software on the Kolab Now platform. The update will add a few features for our support and admin personnel, which are hidden from normal users. Of course we also take the opportunity to fix a line of minor defects with the same update.
The service window is expected to last for no more than 1 hour, ending on Saturday, 19th of June 2021, at 10:00 UTC.
Incident Report: IMAP backend server out of memory
On Monday night, the 7th of June 2021 @ 18:29 UTC, a process on one of our many backend servers was taking a lot of memory; faster than it could release it again, which made the server run out of memory and stop responding. The server were serving IMAP for a limited group of users, who in turn were impacted by the incident
As the server was heavily monitored, alarms were going off with the staff, but was little noticed, as it happened in a low traffic period, and as the systems are build to fix such situations themselves. The systems in this class usually just restore and keep working. This time however, the server did not come up in a timely manner, and the mentioned users saw their mailboxes freeze and their mail become unavailable.
The staff realized that something was not as it should be and went on to manually restore the situation. At 20:27 UTC the server was back up and running, and all mailboxes were available again.
No data was in danger, and mail delivery to the impacted mailboxes continued during the incident.
We apologize for any inconvenience that this incident may have caused.
