Sections:Fails

 Dear SureMail™ Users, we experienced MS Outlook connectivity issues for some users on our SureMail™ MS Exchange 2013 from March 1 to March 6, 2014.

From March 1 to March 5 some of our Hosted Exchange 2013 users experienced difficulty in accessing their mailboxes through MAPI (Outlook) or ActiveSync protocol.  The issue was caused by a limitation of Exchange 2013 Enterprise software for RPC protocol connections on Exchange Mailbox Servers.  Our monitoring logs showed that between 10:30 am and 4:00 PM EST up to 10% of connections to some our Mailbox servers were dropped and users had difficulty reconnecting, due to a problem with the RPC service on the Mailbox servers. Our Exchange engineers coordinated directly with MS Engineers to finally diagnose the root cause of the issue and fix for the servers. 

The fix was successfully applied on the night of March 5.  This corrected the improper Exchange behavior ensuring that the RPC connections would no longer be dropped or blocked.  There continued to be isolated issues due to the emergency work-arounds we had to put in place during this troubleshooting on March 6 and full fixes for all issues were resolved as of that evening. 

This is the longest troubleshooting of a single issue we have experienced in almost 10 years working with these hosted Exchange services.  We deployed all available resources to diagnose and work with Microsoft to implement the repair and understand the headaches and expense the connectivity issues cost.  OWA access was available during the connection issues to local Outlook clients. 

We are glad to report this full resolution and our continued commitment to ensure improvements to our architecture so we can address issues even better for the future as well. Thanks again for the opportunity to be of service and for your understanding. 

 

 If you have any questions, please email This email address is hidden from email harvesters via JavaScript or call 1-800-882-8701 x1.

 

Thank You,

- Your SureTech™ Solutions Team