[Coral-List] list disruption, lost emails

[Mike Jankulak]

Listers,

I wanted to make everyone aware that there have been email problems this
week at the Coral-List mailserver. Emails that arrived August 7th to
10th (Tuesday through today) may have been lost. We are currently
testing a workaround that should avoid the problem completely. This
message is part of that test.

The server currently receives upwards of 40,000 spam messages per day,
largely from the same source. The server bounces these messages quite
efficiently (a remedy I put in place last March) but what I didn't
realize is the lab's intermediate systems have been getting overloaded,
before this traffic even reaches the list.

An estimated 500,000 queued messages were deleted yesterday to provide
temporary relief. It's not currently clear to me whether those 500,000
messages (most of them from that one spammer) will be put back into our
queue or not. We have to assume that some legitimate email may have been
lost irretrievably.

So the bottom line is, be aware that if you sent email to the list
recently, we may not have received it. At present the moderation queue
is empty, so if you believe your posting maybe have been lost, please
re-send it. You can always check out online archives if you have any
questions about what has been posted to the list:

http://coral.aoml.noaa.gov/pipermail/coral-list/

Mike J+, coral-list mod team