Re: Yikes- new message!

Having been married to a programmer and all round computer geek for many a year, you have my sympathy. Try some of Walters Jack Daniels, have a rest, smell some flowers and it will all go away soon enough. All of us will survive, and really do appreciate the job you do.
Lillian,
Zone 5


----Original Message Follows----
From: "Christopher P. Lindsey" <lindsey@mallorn.com>
Reply-To: perennials@hort.net
To: perennials@hort.net
CC: owner-pumpkins@mallorn.com, owner-hosta-open@mallorn.com
Subject: Re: Yikes- new message!
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 09:43:52 -0500

> Doubt it is a virus- Chris doesn't use windows. He will track it down
> and fix it--- actually, I think he already has.... only current messages
> in my e-box this morn :)
>
> So Chris, did you throw the server out the window yet? LOL!

Just about. :)

Once again, my apologies to everyone about this. I've figured out what
happened, but not why it happened. And here I thought we had such a good
track record with the lists. :(

How embarrassing, especially since I do this for a living, too...

Anyhow, for those of you who care:

When email is received by a server it takes your message and sticks
it into a queue somewhere. That queue contains all of the messages
that need to be delivered.

Every hour or so the system goes and looks in the queue to see if any
messages have been waiting to be delivered (for example, if your ISP
was down our system would keep trying every hour to send you your
copy). Once it sends the message out it deletes the entry from the
queue.

Unfortunately, in our case something weird happened. It wasn't
deleting old messages from the queue at all after it sent them.

Yesterday morning we had an hour-long power outage. When the power came
back on the system rebooted, looked in the queue, and saw that it had
over 10,000 messages waiting to be processed. Nevermind that some were
from June -- it dutifully went through the queue and started delivering
everything that it saw.

Of course, this meant that a lot of people got old emails again. I
deleted a lot of the older entries by hand, but it was a losing battle
since the computer could process them faster than me. Eventually I
just ended up moving the entire queue somewhere else so that the
system wouldn't process it and created a new, empty queue. Now I
need to go through the old queue and figure out was valid and what
wasn't.

I really apologize.

Chris

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