email and other electrical difficulties

[N. J. A. Sloane]

There have been 5 events this year that have interrupted things
here, and i pass them along because they could affect you.

1. Last week our postmaster put South West Bell (swbell) on
his list of spammers.  This meant that if your ISP was South West Bell,
and you tried to send me email, it was instantly bounced back
as "rejected".  Exactly as if I no longer existed.

Apparently he adds 100 such domain names to his list every week.

2. One Friday evening earlier this year AT&T Labs was put on the 
global list of spammers, which meant that outgoing mail was
held up all weekend.

3. Incoming email here is now passed through a spam filter.
This has an adjustable threshold.  One Friday at 5pm they
turned the threshold up so high that it rejected ALL incoming mail,
then left for the weekend.  This was especially bad because when
you send in a new sequence or comment via the form on the EIS
web site, this gets converted into an email message (to get
it by the firewall) and those email messages were lost.
They vanished without trace.

4. Last Sunday our mail program completely broke down for
unexplained reasons, and again all mail was LOST for about 12 hours. 
This was not the spam filter, but usual mail program.

5. Our Lab has a contract with some company to provide
an Uninterruptable Power Supply, or UPS, so that our
computers need never be shut off. Except that the contract
allows them to do maintenance every year, and this year 
they shut down all power to all our buildings
and all our computers one weekend from 3pm Friday to Monday
morning. Yes, unbelievable, but true.


In short, if you send email these days, and it bounces,
it doesn't necessarily mean the address was wrong,
it is just as likely to a spam blocker somewhere along
the path.

If you try to use the EIS and it isn't working, try again later.
If you send in a new sequence or comment and don't get the
automatic acknowledgement, it may not have reached me.

But the EIS and I still exist.  The URL is
http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/
my email address is still njas at research.att.com,
and in case of trouble my phone numbers are
973 360 8415 (o), 973 360 8178 (f), 732 828 6098 (h)

Neil Sloane