Views from Medina Road

Email to Locusmag seemed to disappear for about 24 hours, starting Friday morning around 10:30 (Pacific time). The problem didn't fix itself, like some DSL issues do, so this morning I contacted CI Host, our web hosting service, and got a reply about 3 hours later to the effect that the "var partition" had been cleared, thus restoring e-mail. Period. Not finding this explanation entirely illuminating, I got online and entered into chat with the same technical guy at CI Host who'd responded with the email. I wondered if by any chance my resetting of mis-addressed email to locusmag.com, to divert it into limbo instead of my inbox, had screwed something up, directing hundreds of megs of emails into some buffer, now full. No, LOL. It was just that the var partition was full, the domain didn't exist in the login database; new system, new database. OIC...well, whatever.

As near as I can tell, the CI Host folks transitioned some function that interprets domains names and/or email addresses from one system to another, and accidentally dropped all the locusmag settings. The effect was to bounce everything sent to *@locusmag.com; the reason I wasn't able to download email was that there wasn't any, none of it was being accepted by the host.

So what actually happened to everything sent that 24 hours? Bounced? Well, at least one email that *I* sent Locus HQ Friday afternoon did in fact arrive this afternoon, about 24 hours late. So it must have sat in limbo somewhere--or the server from work (from where I sent it) just kept trying until it got through. Anyway. These things happen, I guess. I should have jumped on the problem sooner, perhaps, but all's well that...