I'm sad to report that The Mail Archive bounced a number of messages between Sunday 2006-11-19 17:28:52 PST and Tuesday 2006-11-21 17:25:46 PST. If your list had traffic during this time, please double check to make sure archive@mail-archive.com is still subscribed. Sometimes list servers will unsubscribe users after a bounce.
So what happened? One of the techniques we use to fight spam is called a whitelist. Basically it is a list of trusted computers that The Mail Archive is willing to accept mail from. That includes the official MX servers used by mail-archive.com, and it also includes the computer that runs gossip. As you may remember, that particular computer was recently replaced by a smaller, much more energy efficient model. Sunday to be exact. The whitelist wasn't aware of this change, and kind of went crazy when it couldn't resolve the name of the replaced machine. We ended up bouncing a decent of amount of mail. Most of our safeguards are for dieing computers, not ones being actively unruly! Jeff Marshall noticed the problem on Tuesday and had a fix in within an hour. We spent a lot of time after that examining logs and assessing the impact. So how to keep this from happening in the future? Unfortunately this gotcha that was completely unexpected, which makes it harder. We know to never again use anything by an IP addresses in Exim4 configuration files. We know to watch the SMTP logs very carefully whenever making network changes, even if it seems unrelated. Most importantly, we've simplified email configurations enough that the rule that got us in trouble is no needed. And I think we'll probably set up (yet another) automated monitor some time after Thanksgiving, specifically looking for this problem. That's pretty much all I can think of. Except to apologize. I'm sorry this happened. Many lists may see a short gap in archives, and as mentioned several will need to resubscribe to the service. Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or if I can help with anything. Thank you. Jeff -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
