[Bioperl-l] bioperl-l list back from the dead --- sorry for todays mail flood

[Chris Dagdigian]

Hi everyone,

It took us (ok..me) an unacceptably long time to realize that bioperl-l 
had been dead since about May 1st -- normally our mail related problems 
are less subtle (ie everything explodes into flames all at once). In 
this case all of our other mailing lists were working fine so we really 
did not notice anything strange until some helpful list members 
mentioned that they had not seen a bioperl email in many days.

Without going into the gory details something happened to bioperl-l that 
caused our mailing list server to freak out on each incoming bioperl 
email and 'shunt' the messages into a "I can't deliver this!" holding 
area on our server. I suspect but cannot prove that the problem was 
triggered by a subscriber using 8-bit international unicode chars in an 
email address or comment field. That is what the logs suggest anyway.

The good news is that we don't think we lost any email messages. Now 
that the list is back up I'm manually trying to unshunt and dequeue all 
of the older messages.

If there are any undeliverable messages left in the holding area this 
evening I will contact the senders so they can re-send their messages if 
necessary.

Now for the bad or at least inconvenient news:

After trying for days to fix the problem we finally had to blow away the 
bioperl-l list and recreate it with the same settings and subscribers. 
Some information did get 'lost' in the process:

1. All subscribers have new passwords for managing their subscription 
options. If you want to change your list options you will need to press 
the "email me my password" button. To get to the list management GUI 
just follow the links that appear in the email headers or at the bottom 
of each and every list email

2. 8 of the ~300 people who recieve this list in digest-mode elected to 
recieve MIME encoded digests instead of the default plaintext. This 
preference was not carried over. I will personally manually make this 
change for the 8 people who want it.


Apologies for the inconvenience.

Regards,
Chris
Open-Bio.org




-- 
Chris Dagdigian, <dag at sonsorol.org>
BioTeam Inc. - Independent Bio-IT & Informatics consulting
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