Tue Dec 14 08:36:11 PST 1999 — The mail server handling outbound email for most customers had a number of problems overnight, and I’ve made some changes to fix this trouble. It was having some problems restarting sendmail during a scheduled reload, leaving the system without a mailer deamon running. Users trying to send mail from a SMTP client via mail.sonic.net would have received a message about a refused connection, and any outbound email would remain in their outbox. During the next attempt, all that email will be processed.
We spent much of yesterday backlogged by about an hour on email, and we brought another mail server online Monday afternoon to handle the load. These changes should allow us to stay caught up with the huge email volume that we’re handling here now. Sorry about the quirky behavior and delays, we’ll keep an eye on things this AM to make sure that our six email servers remain stable and fast.