IMAP and POP3 don’t work, but I can’t login with webmail either, I get a 500 Internal Server Error. Things can happen, and maybe it’s a brute force attack again.
What’s absolutely not professional, however, is the fact that there’s no explanation on https://status.runbox.com/ despite the fact that these errors have been happening for hours.
With no explanation, I’m left wondering:
Things seem to work again. But come on, IMAP was down for more than 4 hours according to NodePing, and there’s still no explanation what was going on?
It’s frustrating, you want to like Runbox and you want them to do well, but this lack of timely support - something I always recommended as being very good in the past - is so disappointing.
I want to see Runbox succeed, but email is such a critical part of my workflow,
I decided to transfer away from them after this, I cant keep giving them chances 
And it’s not just us having a similar view, unfortunately:
Source: EMDiscussions: "Runbox webmail and IMAP currently failing here in…" - Mastodon
We sincerely apologize for not catching this incident earlier.
The cause for the downtime was a central NFS (Network File System) server that became unresponsive, and while automatic alerts were sent from our monitoring systems they were not sufficiently registered and responded to in a timely manner.
The reason for this is partly that despite our continuous efforts at fine-tuning both internal and external alerting systems, there is still a need for adjustments in order to distinguish between minor timeouts and actual outages. We will work to improve this situation further to more effectively respond to real alarms.
Due to continued growth our service is simultaneously experiencing capacity and resource challenges that we are currently working to resolve by installing additional hardware, transitioning to a distributed architecture that is more resilient and reliable, and scaling our system ahead of projected growth in our customer base and resource usage.
From a human standpoint the incident unfortunately also occurred at a time where our team’s geographical distribution was limited, which otherwise would have facilitated greater ability to detect and respond to alerts. We aim to expand this distribution going forward to allow for more evenly balanced human monitoring in order to more effectively manage automatic alerts.
Through these actions we hope to be able to restore your trust in our service and our team, and retain your loyalty in the time to come.
– Geir
Thank you, @Geir, for this explanation! Although there were worrying incidents in 2022, I felt that the communication situation had already gotten better in 2023. That’s why I was a bit confused two days ago and started worrying again.
It’s good that Runbox is growing, and I think everyone here wants you to succeed. Runbox has a lot of potential, but I also feel that you’re somehow not able to tap into this potential (for example, people often overlook Runbox in articles about secure and private email services, you just see Proton Mail, Tutanota etc.). But maybe I’m wrong. I sure hope I’m wrong!
