Boom Goes the Mail Server

As most of you will know, I recently obtained a Palm Treo650, which I quickly tied onto the florack.us mail servers.  Last night while adding a spam handler to the little bugger’s feed, I apparently fouled up somewhere.

To handle all the mail around here, both for the blog and the family and personal situations, I have  several individual email accounts, across four different domains. These are all being handled with a (yes, one) Thunderbird client. T-bird automatically manages each account, for spam, who needs to see what, what needs to get sent to the Palm eventually and which I need to know about right now.  It also manages killing of old mail from itself and from the servers.

While writing new client scripts last night, to handle some new situations that came up recently,   I must have gotten one of the scripts crossed up in the direction it was supposed to fire stuff off in, because about 3 this morning, it fired off something… I’ve yet to determine just what… that put the whole mess into a feedback loop, generating thousands of notification messages which were then sent to my Treo’s account, with copies of the header being sent to my text message channel so as to blow the alarm, letting me know they were there.  By the time I figured out what was lighting up all the alarms, the server had melted.

I’ve got it all shut down, now, and partially restarted as you read this,  and I’m doing some deconstruction now to see what’s happened.

Bottom line: Mail around here’s going to be a little weird for this morning.

It’s all working again now at the server level, but there’s nothing on the client end to direct it where it needs to go, for the most part, though that is improving. In short my responses to your emails will be a little delayed.

It’s coming back online slowly as I pick apart each script and re-enable the unoffending ones. Should take a few hours.

Bitsblog authors, and extended family members, your mail is unaffected.