UPDATE ON EMAIL DIFFICULTIES - Wednesday, June 30, 2004, 2:49pm
We noticed yesterday around noon that the mail system had another delivery lag. The volume of spam on our system has increased more than 10-fold over the last year. Several user accounts are each receiving upwards of 10,000 pieces of SPAM each day. The mail load has gone from about 40 per minute to more than 200 per minute - and of course, most of it is SPAM. This is what's causing the lag. We are making our systems less receptive to this type of problem. Unfortunately, this might have adverse effects if your machine is somehow misconfigured; we have tried in the past to be tolerant of various problems with older machines; but we can no longer do that. Once we manage to slow down the flood, the backlog should start to clear up.
When the crisis has passed, we will elaborate on the possible misconfiguration issues. In the meantime, we are in overdrive trying to implement a solution to the immediate problem. We know this is causing problems - especially for our business customers. We offer our most sincere apology to all users.