Clearswift Domain Outage

Email security provider Clearswift recently encountered a domain name catastrophe that caused disruption to several customers email systems.

The problem occurred when the domain where customers’ emails are routed for spam and viruses before being filtered, offline mimesweeper.biz, went. According to reports, the WhoIs record for the domain shows that it expired on December 13, 2007, suggesting that the outage was likely caused by Clearswift’s forgetfulness to renew its registration.

Reports of the problem emerged on Wednesday morning in the UK and by the evening, support staff had created some backup options that involved customers putting additional addresses into their email servers’ configuration files so that in case of failure of the primary server, the email would be routed to a second or third address rather than failing. At present, the majority of customers have been assisted, but Clearswift says there are remaining customers that haven’t implemented the current solution and are threatening charges.

Although Clearswift is still uncertain what precisely caused the outage, its director of product management, Alyn Hockey, says the hypothesis regarding the lapsed registration may be correct.

Clearswift says it has approximately 17,000 business customers and filters content for about 25 million end users. Hockey says around five percent were affected by the outage.