response 151 of 188:

Dec 5 08:55 UTC 2000

ls
help

response 153 of 188:

Dec 12 03:36 UTC 2000

Earlier this evening, I think the net connection died.  There was a 
period of 10-15 minutes when I wasn't able to access anything using 
BackTalk.  I was getting "There was no response from the server" 
messages.  It was at about 10:00pm, I think.

response 155 of 188:

Dec 12 13:38 UTC 2000

Sendmail was down for about 10 minutes this morning, about 8:10a-8:30a.
Ok, 20 minutes.  I found a mass mailer, who had managed to queue up 468
messages, and I wanted to move those messages out of the queue before
they got delivered...

response 157 of 188:

Dec 13 14:25 UTC 2000

Thanks, Marcus!

response 159 of 188:

Dec 15 02:16 UTC 2000

(sadly, the I-Net connection seems to be down.  weather-related?)

response 161 of 188:

Dec 15 03:24 UTC 2000

(if it was off-site email, the two are related.)  :^)

response 163 of 188:

Dec 15 03:34 UTC 2000

Maybe we don't understand what you mean by "Email is taking a long time
to send."  Can you explain or expand?

response 165 of 188:

Dec 15 03:56 UTC 2000

(my understanding is that pine tries to send immediately. after some
period of time, if the send is not successful, the mail is queued for an
attempt at a later time. however, I defer to staff on this one.)   ;)

response 167 of 188:

Dec 15 11:36 UTC 2000

(Re #165:  I don't think so, Carson.  pine or any other MUA (mail client)
should hand mail off to Grex's sendmail to deal with.  That generates the
MUA's "sent" message, if there is one.  The message is then in the queue. 
If sendmail can't deliver it, it's held.

OTOH, if the net connection is down, there could be a lot of sendmail
processes all trying to move queued mail out.  This might slow down the
creation of new sendmail processes to accept mail from a user client program.
If that's so, our net problems could be related to the reported symptom.)

response 169 of 188:

Dec 15 21:09 UTC 2000

The network connection has definitely been intermittently flakey.  Last
I heard, we knew it was an Ameritech problem; I don't know what progress
there has been since.

We've certainly had other problems which I guess could be categorized as
"stupid vandals".  Today I discovered what appeared to be a mail loop
maliciously created by someon in attempt to either disable one or more
mail systems, or mail flood someone.  I'm not sure which; but the result
on grex was 120 copies of sendmail were all busy reading huge messages.
This didn't affect the load average much, but meant there was annoying
net lag.  I managed to eventually sort things out such that sendmail was
sending "mailbox is full" messages for the grex account involved with
this mess, about 1 every 3 seconds for a while.  It seems to have
stopped now, which means either I broke the mail loop, or somebody else
noticed the problem and is busy cleaning up their end.

response 171 of 188:

Dec 17 23:25 UTC 2000

  On Thursday (Dec. 14) I was downloading prospective e-mail
onto the "mail" composition screen (not one of the editor
screens) when the screen froze, with the downloading
unfinished; I waited a few minutes and as the screen was
still frozen I disconnected, probably by mouse clicking a
disconnection option.

  Assuming that my unfinished e-mail had not been sent, I
was surprised shortly thereafter to receive responses to the
message from people who now think of me as one who sends
e-mails which end abruptly and which do not complete a
coherent message.

  Aside from recommending Pine or Elm, is there any way I
can continue to use "mail" without being concerned about the
possibility of sending unfinished e-mail?

response 173 of 188:

Dec 18 05:56 UTC 2000

  If he was using "mail" (aka UCB mail), mail composition occurs in
  line mode unless you call up whatever visual editor you've set in
  $EDITOR or $VISUAL..

  It sounds like his TCP connection went sour while he was composing
  and mail read that as being an EOF-like condition on its input stream.
  Presumably what should have happened was that it should have received
  a SIGHUP from the system and saved the letter he was composing in 
  ~/dead.letter