Cyren Service having intermittent issues 4/13/2016

Problem reported by CCC - 4/13/2016 at 8:37 AM

Resolved

Service Alert for CYREN Anti-Spam service

Intermittent response for the CYREN Anti-Spam service as of 12:00 UTC.

The issue is under investigation and CYREN teams are working on resolution.

During this time window you may encounter a few error messages in your logs and temporary failover to one of the other fully operational Data Centers.

https://www.cyren.com/service-status.html

18 Replies

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Employee Replied

4/13/2016 at 8:59 AM

Employee Post

Thank you for the report! We've posted statuses on our social media accounts as well. You can follow those for updates as the issue with Cyren resolves. In the meantime, we recommend disabling Cyren and using SmarterMail's built-in spam resources in order to avoid processing delays in the spool.

CCC Replied

4/13/2016 at 9:19 AM

No problem, hope this update helps some other Smartermail Admins out there.

Here are a few relevant links so those with spool backups don't have to go digging.

Smarter Tools Recommended Spam Settings

http://portal.smartertools.com/kb/a2734/recommended-spam-settings.aspx

Bruce's Anti-spam Document

https://portal.chicagonettech.com/kb/a171/smartermail-antispam-settings-document.aspx

Employee Replied

4/13/2016 at 10:01 AM

Employee Post

Looks like Cyren has given the all-clear on their Service Status page:

"Update - as of 16:05 UTC the Anti-Spam service in all Data Centers is fully operational."

If you disabled the Cyren spam check while the issue was occurring, you can now re-enable it within SmarterMail.

CCC Replied

4/13/2016 at 10:08 AM

Just turned Cyren back on. Spool count is slowly rising, will monitor for a bit and report back

CCC Replied

4/13/2016 at 10:50 AM

We are not out of the woods quite yet. I left the server run for 30 minutes with Cyren enabled and spool continued rising the entire time. The spool emptied as soon as I turned Cyren off.

Perhaps their servers are overwhelmed due to a backlog during the outage?

ScottF Replied

4/13/2016 at 10:52 AM

I turned Cyren back on about 1:30pm Eastern. It still had problems so I turned it off. Maybe the fix hasn't fully propagated.

From the delivery log:

13:36:33 Cyren ran into an error scanning a message.
13:36:33 [51971] Unable to run Commtouch check: Exception while processing message: 51971, Exception: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Jose Gomez Replied

4/13/2016 at 10:56 AM

Ugh - thousands of messages in the queue. Turned Cyren off, now queue is just staying the same.

Employee Replied

4/13/2016 at 12:49 PM

Employee Post

Unfortunately, I don't have anymore information on the Cyren service or this spool issue itself; however, those whose spool is filled with pending messages can follow the steps in this KB to get messages moving again while separating the pending messages for review:

http://portal.smartertools.com/kb/a3009/my-spool-is-full-of-pending-messages_-what-do-i-do.aspx

CCC Replied

4/13/2016 at 1:05 PM

Looks like we may be back in business. I just retested after stopping the SmarterMail and DNS services for 30 seconds, has been working for an hour with no spool backups.

Jose Gomez Replied

4/13/2016 at 2:04 PM

Same here.

Brian Tesene Replied

4/14/2016 at 7:53 AM

Cyren Anti-spam seems to be better now BUT Cyren anti-virus is causing my queue to backup in the same manner. Anyone else?

EDIT: Anti-spam is causing backup again also...just not to the same magnitude as yesterday.

CCC Replied

4/14/2016 at 8:57 AM

I have not had any Cyren Anti-Spam issues since my last post yesterday.

If you haven't already, you might consider clearing your DNS cache and then cycling the smarter mail services. I don't know the extent of changes that happened at Cyren yesterday but it would not surprise me if there were some DNS changes made during the process.

Brian Tesene Replied

4/14/2016 at 9:07 AM

Thanks, will do. Do you mean a standard flush dns on the server or is there something I can do within SmarterMail?

CCC Replied

4/14/2016 at 10:54 AM

I did a standard flush on the DNS server, then stopped and restarted the smarter mail services.

CCC Replied

4/14/2016 at 10:56 AM

To clarify, in my case I have a local DNS server installed on smarter mail itself, and an external DNS server (also under my control) as a backup.

If you don't have direct control of the DNS servers that smarter mail is using, you may not be able to force that flush on the server side (which is what I did)

You could try restarting the DNS Client service on the smarter mail server, that would at least remove local caching issues.