MX (USA) on Opalstack Status

[Resolved] US IMAP impacted by scheduled maintenance

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:02:00 +0000

Fixed - The backlog of incoming mail has been delivered. The maintenance is complete. (07:06 UTC — Jul 23)

Watching - imap1.us.opalstack.com is back online. The backlog of incoming emails is currently being processed. (05:55 UTC — Jul 23)

Investigating - The upstream management systems are back online and we’re now actively working to restore service. (03:47 UTC — Jul 23)

Investigating - The restoration of service is being delayed by an unfortunately-timed outage in our upstream provider’s management systems. We regret the extended downtime and are doing everything that we can to restore service as soon as possible. (02:28 UTC — Jul 23)

Investigating - The resolution of this issue is being delayed by an unfortunately-timed outage in our upstream provider’s management systems. We do regret the extended downtime and are doing everything we can to restore service as soon as possible. (02:24 UTC — Jul 23)

Investigating - The data center team is still working to bring the server back online. (00:30 UTC — Jul 23)

Investigating - The server still has not come back online, the data center team is investigating. (22:33 UTC — Jul 22)

Watching - The server is presently rebooting and should be back online soon. (22:13 UTC — Jul 22)

[July 23 05:38 UTC] The maintenance is complete - imap1.us.opalstack.com is back up and running.

[July 22 15:02 UTC] imap1.us.opalstack.com is currently offline for scheduled maintenance. We’ll update this post when the server is back online. (15:02 UTC — Jul 22)

[Resolved] Microsoft blocking mx1.us.opalstack.com and smtp1.de.opalstack.com

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 15:48:00 +0000

Fixed - The US MX block is now clear. (14:17 UTC — Aug 17)

Watching - The DE SMTP block has been cleared.

We’re still working with Microsoft to clear the US MX block. (17:37 UTC — Aug 16)

At this time mail sent from our DE SMTP server and mail forwarded from one of our US MX servers to outlook.com, hotmail.com, and live.com is being blocked by Microsoft. We’re working with Microsoft to correct the problem.

In the interim:

DE SMTP users can work around the SMTP block by configuring their clients to use smtp2.de.opalstack.com as their outgoing mail server.
US customers who use mail forwarding can work around the MX block by creating new MX records for mx2.us.opalstack.com with priority 5 and mx1.us.opalstack.com with priority 10. (15:48 UTC — Aug 16)

[Resolved] Mail forwarding issue (now resolved)

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 19:33:39 +0000

At around 16:15 UTC on 16 April 2024 a configuration update was deployed to our forwarding mail servers. The update inadvertently included some old configuration that we used when we initially rolled out SRS mail forwarding a few months ago. As a result of this error some mail sent to customer forwarding addresses may have been bounced back to the sender.

The configuration has been corrected today 17 April 2024 as of 19:05 UTC and the old configuration has been purged from our management systems to prevent this from occurring again. (19:33 UTC — Apr 17)

[Resolved] Delays in US incoming mail

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 18:04:00 +0000

Fixed - All pending incoming US mail has been delivered. (20:30 UTC — Apr 2)

Watching - The high load condition is resolved and the backlog of pending mail is being delivered. (18:25 UTC — Apr 2)

At this time there is a high load condition on one of our US IMAP servers which is a variety of issues for some US mail customers including:

Delays in the receipt of incoming mail
Slow performance in IMAP mail clients
Slow performance in the Opalstack US webmail system

We’re working to mitigate the problem at this time and will update this post when more information is available. (18:04 UTC — Apr 2)

[Resolved] Delays in mail forwarding to Google

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 01:31:36 +0000

Fixed - The bcklog of deferred mail is now clear. (11:55 UTC — Feb 24)

Google is once again rate-limiting messages forwarded from our MX servers. We’re working to resolve this and expect the backlog to be cleared over the next several hours.

As a temporary workaround, customers can route an Opalstack mailbox to their forwarding email address and then use that mailbox as a POP3 account in their Gmail settings.

We will update this post when the backlog of forwarded messages is cleared. (01:31 UTC — Feb 24)

[Resolved] Delays in mail forwarding to Google

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 16:44:01 +0000

Fixed - All of the pending forwarded mail has been delivered. (19:23 UTC — Feb 19)

Google had rate-limited 2 of our forwarding MX servers over the weekend resulting in forwarding delays for some users who forward mail to Gmail.

We’ve corrected the cause of the rate limit and expect all pending mail to be delivered over the next several hours. (16:44 UTC — Feb 19)

[Resolved] Change to default SPF and DMARC policies

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 20:03:12 +0000

On 23 January 2024 we began publishing default SPF and DMARC DNS records for domains that use Opalstack’s DNS and mail systems.

The default policies that we published were somewhat restrictive and were causing mail sent from some customer domains to go to spam so we’ve made the following changes to the policies:

The policy for SPF has been changed from hard fail “-all” to soft fail “~all”.
The policy for DMARC has been changed from “quarantine” to “none”.

The net result of these changes is that customer mail is still compliant with SPF and DMARC but with a less-restrictive policy to help legitimate mail arrive in your inbox. (20:03 UTC — Jan 24)

[Resolved] IPv6 email rejections

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 13:07:00 +0000

A misconfiguration in our IPv6 DNS settings was causing some mail providers (including Gmail) to reject some mail sent or forwarded from Opalstack’s mail system over the past 3-4 days. The problem has been corrected. (13:07 UTC — Oct 19)

[Resolved] Delays in US mail forwarding to @yahoo.com addresses

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 17:54:45 +0000

Fixed - Yahoo are no longer deferring mail forwarded from our US MX servers. (13:05 UTC — Oct 15)

Watching - Yahoo have begun to accept some mail forwarded from our US MX servers. We’ll continue to monitor. (20:34 UTC — Oct 14)

An abusive network was sending a very high volume of messages to a @yahoo.com forwarding address hosted on Opalstack’s US mail system. The high volume of mail has caused Yahoo to temporarily defer messages resulting in delayed delivery.

We’ve blocked the abusive network and expect that Yahoo will begin to accept the deferred messages over the next few hours as their systems register the overall message volume decrease. (17:54 UTC — Oct 14)

[Resolved] mx2.us.opalstack.com blocked by Microsoft

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 22:44:00 +0000

Fixed - mx2.us.opalstack.com is no longer blocked by Microsoft. (13:29 UTC — Oct 9)

Watching - Microsoft have stated mx2.us.opalstack.com has been de-listed and that it may take 24-48 hours for the change to fully propagate through their mail systems. We will continue to monitor. (22:26 UTC — Oct 7)

At this time Microsoft is blocking mail forwarded to hotmail.com and outlook.com addresses via our mx2.us.opalstack.com server. We believe we’ve identified the cause and are currently waiting on Microsoft to lift the block.

In the meantime, customers who forward mail from their Opalstack-hosted domains to a Hotmail or Outlook address may want to assign a Opalstack mailbox to their email address to assure that they do not miss any incoming messages.

We’ll update this post when we’ve either received a reply from Microsoft or when we can confirm that the block has been lifted. (22:44 UTC — Oct 6)

[Resolved] US SMTP blocked by Cloudmark

Sat, 27 Aug 2022 02:24:00 +0000

Fixed - We’ve confirmed that there are no further blocks by Cloudmark. (18:32 UTC — Aug 30)

Watching - Cloudmark have stated that they have de-listed the server IPs. We’ll continue to monitor until we see no further blocks in the mail logs. (23:19 UTC — Aug 29)

Watching - We’re still working with Cloudmark to have the US SMTP and MX servers delisted. (20:26 UTC — Aug 29)

Watching - We’ve discovered that the US MX servers are also blocked. This could cause mail forwarding to fail if the final recipient domain is using the Cloudmark block list, so we’ve requested delisting of those as well. (14:27 UTC — Aug 27)

At this time our US SMTP is being blocked by the Cloudmark Sender Intelligence block list. We’ve dealt with the cause and have started the de-listing process.

If you receive a bounce message, please do not attempt to delist the server yourself via the URL in the error message. We’re taking care of it.

We’ll update this post when the server has been removed from the list. (02:24 UTC — Aug 27)

[Resolved] Mail server certificates expired

Thu, 30 Sep 2021 14:43:09 +0000

Fixed - The issue is now resolved. The root cause was an obsolete root certificate on our servers. The certificate has been updated. (15:10 UTC — Sep 30)

The SSL certificates used by Opalstack’s mail servers are expired. We’re working to correct that at this time and should have it resolved shortly. (14:43 UTC — Sep 30)

[Resolved] Temporary SSL problem in US mail system

Mon, 17 May 2021 06:00:00 +0000

At approximately 06:00 UTC on 17 May 2021 we inadvertently pushed the wrong set of SSL certificates to our US mail system.

Customers who attempted to access the mail system during that period may have seen certificate warning messages and would not have been able to access their mail.

The problem was fixed approximately 30 minutes later and the mail system has been working normally since that time. No incoming or outgoing mail was lost during the incident.

If you are still seeing a certificate error while attempting to use the US mail system then please restart your mail client and/or reboot your computer. If the problem persists then please contact Opalstack support for assistance. (06:00 UTC — May 17)

[Resolved] Forwarding from US MX servers blocked by AT&T

Fri, 13 Nov 2020 19:01:00 +0000

Fixed - AT&T are no longer blocking mail forwarded from our US MX servers. (16:29 UTC — Nov 14)

Watching - AT&T says that our US MX servers will be unblocked in 24-48 hours. (22:01 UTC — Nov 13)

At this time AT&T is blocking mail forwarded from our US MX servers. We’re working with AT&T to resolve the problem. (19:01 UTC — Nov 13)

[Resolved] Service disruption in San Francisco

Sun, 16 Aug 2020 13:00:00 +0000

Fixed - All SFO servers are now back online. (16:17 UTC — Aug 16)

Identified - vps15 and mx2.us are back online. (15:54 UTC — Aug 16)

Identified - The webmail server is back online and is operational with the exception of sending mail. We’re still waiting on the remaining servers to come back online. (15:26 UTC — Aug 16)

Identified - The data center team reports:

The issue has been identified as a utility power issue. Power is transferred to generators and is currently running stable and network connectivity is restored for the vast majority of the services.

We’re starting to see the remaining machines come online at this time. (15:08 UTC — Aug 16)

Investigating - opal3.opalstack.com is back online at this time. Other servers are still offline and we’re awaiting a report on the initial investigation from the data center team. (14:19 UTC — Aug 16)

Services in our San Francisco data center are currently disrupted. The following servers are affected:

community.opalstack.com
mx2.us.opalstack.com
opal3.opalstack.com
smtp2.us.opalstack.com
vps4.opalstack.com
vps5.opalstack.com
vps6.opalstack.com
vps13.opalstack.com
vps15.opalstack.com
vps16.opalstack.com
vps17.opalstack.com
vps19.opalstack.com
vps21.opalstack.com
vps24.opalstack.com
vps28.opalstack.com
webmail.us.opalstack.com

We’ll update this post as soon as more information is available. (13:00 UTC — Aug 16)

[Resolved] Cron mail not working

Sun, 14 Jun 2020 22:24:11 +0000

Fixed - Mail from cron jobs should be working normally now. (20:58 UTC — Jun 16)

At the present time mail is not being sent by cron jobs on our web servers. We’re looking into the cause. (22:24 UTC — Jun 14)

[Resolved] US MX server blacklisted by Cloudmark

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 19:19:00 +0000

Fixed - The MX server has been delisted. (17:30 UTC — Nov 26)

Watching - We believe the blacklisting happened due to an influx of spam that was subsequently forwarded to external forwarding targets for various customers. We’ve removed the spam from our mail queue and are standing by for the server to be de-listed. (20:10 UTC — Nov 25)

mx1.us.opalstack.com is presently blacklisted by Cloudmark. As a result, email forwarded to domains that use Cloudmark services may be delayed or bounced.

We’re presently working with Cloudmark to have the server delisted and will update this incident when more information is available. (19:19 UTC — Nov 25)