This message is for people who receive their BIOSCI/bionet e-mail from
net.bio.net, i.e., BIOSCI subscribers located in the Americas and
Pacific Rim countries and participants in our prototype newsgroups who
may be located anywhere in the world. If you do not fall into this
category, i.e., if you receive your mail from the U.K. BIOSCI node at
dl.ac.uk/daresbury.ac.uk, you can skip this message.
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I posted a notice to several of our more heavily used newsgroups a
week ago describing the BIOSCI mail queue problems that developed at
the BIOSCI node at net.bio.net after a sendmail upgrade for security
reasons around the beginning of March. This message is to update you
on progress because I am continuing to get mail to the biosci-help
technical support address about this issue. Hopefully this message
will alleviate some of these repeated questions.
As mentioned earlier, the BIOSCI mail queue is always large and thus
we did not notice the problem caused by the upgrade for a couple of
weeks. To resolve the mail backlog we have taken the following steps:
1) Extremely aggressive automated deletion of troublesome addresses in
our mail queues to keep the queue from growing bigger.
Unfortunately some mailer error messages are ambiguous and we can
not always differentiate between permanent and temporary mail
outage problems despite our best efforts to do so. In the past we
wanted to err on the side of caution but can not afford to do that any
longer. If you subscribe at net.bio.net and your computer
system/network tends to be flaky, you may be a potential target,
so please be prepared to resubscribe via our server if this
happens. I include e-mail subscription instructions below. Once
again I also encourage you to look into getting news software. I am
getting particularly annoyed by sites that tell me they take their
Internet connection down for extended periods of time on a regular
basis!!
2) We split the mail queue here up into separate queues. All recent
postings are going out without delay in the standard queue. We have
several hundred mail messages in the period March 1 to March 14 still
sitting in a separate queue and we are running scripts to try to force
these messages through to the remaining addresses that have not
received them as soon as possible. Many people may have already
received these messages by e-mail, so do not assume that *all* of you
reading this message are hundreds of messages behind.
We are expecting to be caught up by sometime this weekend. You may
receive old mail as a result of this situation, and people who
canceled subscriptions recently may continue to get messages that were
queued prior to their cancellation.
Our apologies for this snafu. It would be nice if I could say that
this will never happen again, but as long as one has to update UNIX
software for Internet security reasons one can not rule out a future
repeat.
Sincerely,
Dave Kristofferson
BIOSCI/bionet Manager
biosci-help at net.bio.net
