Subject: Outage in Mail Service Yesterday

From: Alexa Morris <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 10:30:36 -0700

Yesterday (Sunday), we experienced an outage in mail service from 10AM  
to 12:20PM Pacific time (5PM-7:20PM GMT).  Ten messages were lost;  
their senders were contacted and the messages resent.

The reason for this outage was, in brief:

In order to add mail filtering to wg-chair aliases on mail.ietf.org,  
Henrik developed and then applied a patch to Postconfirm, the anti- 
spam software he developed for the IETF. Although he had pretested the  
update, there was an unforeseen problem with the way the patch  
interacted with Mailman, the IETF's mail software. Mailman didn't  
recognize what it received from Postconfirm and, instead of rejecting  
the message with an error, it responded by ignoring and deleting the  
messages.

We were notified of the problem at approximately 12pm PT, via the  
IETF's emergency notification system. Mail service was restored within  
30 minutes and, as we stated above, the lost email mail was resent.  
The update to Postcofirm has been reverted pending further review.

Alexa

-----------
Alexa Morris / Executive Director / IETF
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Phone: +1.510.492.4089 / Fax: +1.510.492.4001
Email: [email-masked]

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