Wed Dec 15 14:19:36 PST 1999 — Due to a problem with an e-mail server that we are still investigating, it appears that we may have lost or deferred some percentage of the email that was received here on Tuesday and early Wednesday morning.
Internet e-mail transport is designed to be completely fail-safe, and in fact the logs on the server indicate that it was successfully making deliveries, but it does not appear to have been actually writing the messages to the user’s mailboxes. The design of the e-mail transport protocol does not allow for this type of failure, and we’re currently doing testing to duplicate and characterize the problem. When the trouble was discovered, the server was taken offline immediately, and it is no longer handling any email. This server is one of our six e-mail hosts, and it shared the overall e-mail processing load.
Our logs do include full information on the addresses of all senders and recipients, and each individual Sonic.net user who has been affected will be sent a list shortly including the date and time of each message that should have been delivered, plus the senders e-mail address. In addition, Sonic.net will be proactively informing each e-mail sender from whom a message is missing about the details of that message so that they can re-send any missing messages from their sent-mail folders.
We’re very sorry about this uncharacteristic failure, and we are working to minimize it’s impact by informing senders and recipients now. -Dane, Scott and Eli