[NTLK] [ADMIN] The Recent Mailing List Outage

[Tony Morrow]

On Sep 13, 2011, at 6:48 PM, Grant Hutchinson wrote:

> Whew.
> 
> It looks like we're back in action again.
> 
> The recent mailing list outage was due to a slightly misconfigured  
> server which runs the mailing list software. Something on the server  
> (completely unrelated to NewtonTalk) caused an inordinate amount of  
> memory to be consumed, affecting the mail delivery services.
> 
> Most of the list members received messages indicating that your  
> membership had been "disabled due to excessive bounces". This error  
> had nothing to do with your email accounts or ISPs. It was due to the  
> mail services being unable to delivery any messages and therefore  
> being interpreted as "bounced" email.
> 
> Bill Shamam and Media Temple helped isolate the problem and we were  
> able to restart the server, unclogging the list.
> 
> My apologies for the inconvenience (and those dumb error messages.)
> 
> 
> g.
> 
> ......................................................................

That's good to know I got the notice and assumed it was caused by the one email that went to the mailing list whose entire message was in the subject field. I thought that gmail had blocked it because under normal circumstances subjects are limited to something like 255 characters. You can see the message on in the newtontalk archive. That message may have been what caused all of the problems for the server.

-Tony Morrow