Over the weekend we have worked through a system-wide cleanup to address the after-effects of the high system load experienced last week. The load was the result of an unknown bug that impacted an effort to proactively double system capacity.
Our priority today is to maintain good access and performance while assisting individual users who may have specific issues arising as a result of the previous high system load. In an abundance of caution, we are limiting the number of simultaneous connections to a single mailbox to 2 POP connections and 4 IMAP connections. Mail programs that exceed the limit will usually retry and users are unlikely to see errors due to connection limits.
We are also rate limiting email delivery for mailboxes that receive hundreds or thousands of email messages per minute; that email will safely queue for delivery over a longer period of time. If a user normally receives less email than this, they should see normal delivery speeds.
After peak load hours today, usually finished before 2pm Eastern, we will consider a bulk mailbox level cleanup to address several issues we have identified proactively from system logs. These issues include:
Some mailboxes may require additional attention to resolve some of the issues experienced and our team is actively working through those. We apologize for these extended issues with the email platform and will post here as more information becomes available.