Summary: If you sent me email yesterday or today to my marcocantu.com account it likely got lost!
This is the full story. My mail server hosting the domains marcocantu.com and marcocantu.it has been working oddly yesterday, and basically come to a halt today. Theserver is a Linux box that has had XMail on it working fine for over 3 years. Yesterday the server was sending message back. Today I noticed that nothing was coming into those accounts (that are all forwards to my major GMail accounts), not even spam! This got me suspicious, so I tried sending a message to myself. Not only it didn't get through, but it was not even bounced. It simply disappeared.
Looking at XMail logs it seemed that mails were coming in as usual, but again, the mail box folders were and remained empty. Connecting with a Windows XMail manager application, I started noticing weird effects. At times, the server listed no domains. Other times (after a restart of the server) domains had no mailboxes. As the server is configured to ignored messages to unknown mailboxes (to avoid people using the response message to deliver spam or simply create usless traffic), well the regular mesasges were probably discarded.
After some attempts, I simply decided to accelerate the transition to custom GMail domains I had already started and planned. I has all accounts ready (for marcocantu.com, a marcocantu.it subdomain, and a separate gode.it domain), so all I had to do was redirect the MX Record on the DNS server, and in a couple of hours mesasges started getting to the custom GMail domain and its account. Last, I redirected those accounts to the primary emails I use (the two marco.cantu accounts directly at gmail.com and at my company domain wintech-italia.com hosted by GMail), and I'm back up and running.
Well almost, in the coming minutes I'll fix the code on this blog sending me notification, as with the mail server dead it will either get lost (not too bad) or stop the process and return an error (too bad!). There might be other issues as well, if you notice anything, let me know... I wanted to blog about the native development debate (Michael Swindell, Hadi Hariri and others), but will do that torrow if time permits, as I'll have to pack for my Amsterdam / SDC trip.