Subject: IMPORTANT - UPDATE ON BIOSCI MAIL QUEUE PROBLEMS

From: BIOSCI Administrator <[email-masked]>
Date: 28 Mar 1995 12:37:57 -0800

This message is for people who receive their BIOSCI/bionet e-mail from
net.bio.net, i.e., BIOSCI subscribers located in the Americas and
Pacific Rim countries and participants in our prototype newsgroups who
may be located anywhere in the world.  If you do not fall into this
category, i.e., if you receive your mail from the U.K. BIOSCI node at
dl.ac.uk/daresbury.ac.uk, you can skip this message.

			      ----------

I posted a notice to several of our more heavily used newsgroups a
week ago describing the BIOSCI mail queue problems that developed at
the BIOSCI node at net.bio.net after a sendmail upgrade for security
reasons around the beginning of March.  This message is to update you
on progress because I am continuing to get mail to the biosci-help
technical support address about this issue.  Hopefully this message
will alleviate some of these repeated questions.

As mentioned earlier, the BIOSCI mail queue is always large and thus
we did not notice the problem caused by the upgrade for a couple of
weeks.  To resolve the mail backlog we have taken the following steps:

1) Extremely aggressive automated deletion of troublesome addresses in
   our mail queues to keep the queue from growing bigger.
   Unfortunately some mailer error messages are ambiguous and we can
   not always differentiate between permanent and temporary mail
   outage problems despite our best efforts to do so.  In the past we
   wanted to err on the side of caution but can not afford to do that any
   longer.   If you subscribe at net.bio.net and your computer
   system/network tends to be flaky, you may be a potential target,
   so please be prepared to resubscribe via our server if this
   happens.  I include e-mail subscription instructions below.  Once
   again I also encourage you to look into getting news software.  I am
   getting particularly annoyed by sites that tell me they take their
   Internet connection down for extended periods of time on a regular
   basis!!

2) We split the mail queue here up into separate queues.  All recent
   postings are going out without delay in the standard queue.  We have
   several hundred mail messages in the period March 1 to March 14 still
   sitting in a separate queue and we are running scripts to try to force
   these messages through to the remaining addresses that have not
   received them as soon as possible.  Many people may have already
   received these messages by e-mail, so do not assume that *all* of you
   reading this message are hundreds of messages behind.

We are expecting to be caught up by sometime this weekend.  You may
receive old mail as a result of this situation, and people who
canceled subscriptions recently may continue to get messages that were
queued prior to their cancellation.

Our apologies for this snafu.  It would be nice if I could say that
this will never happen again, but as long as one has to update UNIX
software for Internet security reasons one can not rule out a future
repeat.

				Sincerely,

				Dave Kristofferson
				BIOSCI/bionet Manager

				[email-masked]