I know very (very) little about server security, but you have to assume that this was an inside job.

..but it's a good reminder to backup your own data!

Oh c'mon -- Rick Romero trashed his own servers? He's the only one "inside," so if it's an inside job he would have to be the culprit. What's his motive? It's not like burning down a house for the insurance money. If he wanted to destroy the service he could simply have announced that it was shutting down. And if for some unimaginable reason (which could only be that he had gone bonkers) he wanted to destroy all his customers' data instead of giving them a chance to move it and go somewhere else, he could have done it with the push of a button. Why this way? VFEmail has been messed up for several years now, and the sporadic use of Cloudflare has, IMO, made things worse, at least for me. I am very disappointed, fed up, and more than a little desperate. But let's not libel Rick, who has tried hard to fix things.

This is one reason why I no longer use a small email provider, no matter how good the product or service. There is no way of knowing what infrastructure, software, or procedures the service is using, and inevitably sh*t hits the fan. Yes, we've also seen problems with the biggies like Outlook and Gmail, but they have never been catastrophic failures like this. For those saying that this proves you should have a local backup of all your email, I say maybe, if you are really, really careful, have multiple backups including offsite, and live in a place with no earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, etc. I can't remember where it is located, but I read an interesting article recently about someone who escaped a hurricane that destroyed his home and a huge chunk of Houston, and he said if it weren't for using G Suite his entire business would have been taken down. As it was, he was able to purchase a cheap Chromebook while living hundreds of miles from home and get instantly back up and running. The power of using a large service provider in the cloud.

Another article:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/02/...strophic-hack/

This quote from the article, attributed to Rick:

Note: ****** = sanitised by EMD

If your mail and its online back-ups are lost it doesn't matter whether it's a tiny problem for a very large provider or the catastrophic failure of a very small one.

The chance that a backup fails even the same month as your mail is lost on the server is very small. You don't need anything particularly sophisticated to protect against well over 99% of online failures, which should be very rare events anyway.

So, what now? VFEmail.net, openmail.cc., etc., have been down for days. Has Rick thrown in the towel? Is the service ever going to be usable again? That was one of my few "real" email providers that I actually used regularly and depended on, as opposed to "collecting" services because of location or an unusual domain.

What to do now? Has anyone been in touch with Rick or read any up-to-date Twitter posts?

And a more general question -- why VFEmail? Every couple of years a catastrophe hits it. What are the odds?

Following this link. https://www.vfemail.net/incident.php

How often do you check your backup to make sure it is working properly? To be even more secure simply have your email duplicated at additional cloud providers and benefit from their infinitely more robust and secure infrastructure. This method works even if you prefer the services of a smaller provider as your day-to-day email platform. Simply use Outlook.com or Gmail to back it all up and you are instantly good to go if the main provider goes down, and without the hassle of having to hook up to a new email service, import your emails, etc. That isn't a trivial task and can easily take days to get set up properly.

On Twitter by @VFEMail:

I was referring to the server administrators, not Rick specifically. As I recall, he hosts in the Netherlands.

For the last couple of weeks (or thereabouts), it was possible to log on to VFEmail at a temporary URL Rick set up, and new messages were trickling in. This morning, this is what greeted me when I tried to log on:

___________________________

A fatal error has occurred
Could not connect to any defined memcache servers.
Details have been logged for the administrator.
___________________________

Could someone please tell me what this means?

I suspect the best information is still at this link: https://vfemail.net/incident.php

Registrations are open again.
https://twitter.com/vfemail/status/1...271291393?s=21

Many thanks for sharing this. Keep up the good work!!

Is VFEmail.net down again? Anyone else having problems?
 

Vfemail.net has been working OK for a while as it struggles back to its feet after the attack, but yesterday a problem suddenly came back that I had with it for a year or more before the attack -- Safari says it can't establish a secure connection with VFEmail.net. Before the attack, this would happen maybe seven out of every ten tries and the others times I was able to log in. After the attack, during the shake-out, suddenly this problem went away. Rick suggested an alternative url -- https://cf.vfemail.net' -- to use when I was having the pre-attack problem, because he was using Cloudflare and he thought that might have something to do with it. I tried that today and it gets me to the login page instead of the "no secure connection" dead end, but I still can't log in.

I'm at my wits' end. I don't even know if VFEmail is down or it's just me, because Safari "can't establish a secure connection" with isup.me either!

Is VFEmail down again?