why was the seq fan mailing list broken yesterday?

[Olivier Gerard]

Dear Seqfan Members,

You have all experienced a large delay in receiving mail
from the list in the last few days.
During several days starting Sunday, due to maintenance
procedures which were not notified in advance to local
sysadmins such as myself, almost all incoming mail traffic
to my University Campus was delayed.

Moreover I was absent from the net during that period
so was not able to detect this problem until it was 
already corrected (and did not receive in time inquiries
from seqfan members about the condition, because they
were delayed by the same problem).

This was unfortunate in this period of great change and
animated debate. It seems to be another direct application
of "When something can go wrong, it will be at the worst
possible time".

Thanks to all of you who have been patient and have not
tried to send the same message repeatedly.

A few posters may have received a MAILER-DAEMON notice
stating that their own server *gave* up, after delaying
several times.  In that case, and in that case only,
after checking that they did not receive their message
back to the list, they are welcome to send it again.

All my apologies for the inconvenience.


Olivier GERARD

PS: I expect a few perturbations next month when the
mailing list server will change of hosting machine on
the campus.  I am considering transfering seqfan on
another system outside campus altogether but won't
commit to this kind of changes until the new solution 
has been tested thoroughly.
The most visible change would certainly be in the 
mailing address of the list (currently seqfan at ext.jussieu.fr).
Please, if you want to inquire about this, send
mail directly to me and not to the list.


Neil Sloane wrote
> 
> Yesterday (Sunday) was the day I moved all the new
> web pages to replace the old ones.
> 
> Unfortunately many messages sent to seq fan yesterday afternoon
> did not get sent out until today (Monday).
> 
> So I lost seeing a bunch of important messages.
> 
> Why was the mailing list broken?
> 
> Neil
>