Lippard.Multics 1986-05-20 14:06:00 mst Tue
Subject:  Old mail found
Date:  Monday, 19 May 1986 14:06 mst
From:  Paul Dickson <Dickson>
To:  {mbx >udd>m>jjl>misc>misc}

Every so often you read in the newspaper about the mail sack found with
old mail still in it. Well, here's a deviation of that topic:

From Info-CPM:

>Subject: Mildly antique mail
>Date:  Friday, 16 May 1986 22:31 mst
>From:  Pandora B. Berman <CENT at AI.AI.MIT.EDU>
>To:  arpanet-bboards at MC.LCS.MIT.EDU
>Old-Resent-From:  Arpanet-BBoards-Request at MIT-MC
>Old-Resent-From:  KPETERSEN@SIMTEL20.ARPA
>Old-Resent-To:  Info-Cpm-Request at AMSAA
>Old-Resent-Date:  Sun 18 May 1986 10:47-MDT
>
>Between late December 1985 and April 1986, MIT-MC may have seemed to be
>swallowing all mail larger than fairly small.  Anyone under this impression
>is correct; MC -was- swallowing such mail.  Due to problems with COMSAT,
>the ITS mailer daemon, MC was unable to transmit any mail larger than 2-3
>ITS blocks (approximately 10K-15K chars); rather than drop such messages
>into the bit bucket, COMSAT renamed them to be files on one of its
>auxiliary directories.  Yes, all that lost mail was carefully saved.  So
>now that COMSAT has been fixed, we're about to send all this stored,
>heretofore untransmittable mail along to its originally intended
>destinations.
>
>This means that a lot of mail with very old dates is going to appear over
>the next week or so (the process will take several days so as to not
>overload COMSAT).  Please don't panic at the antiquity of these messages;
>just wait a week and the rush will be over, and then you can return to
>receiving normal, ordinary, recently-sent mail.
>
>A lot of these vastly delayed messages have probably already been resent
>along alternate paths; we apologize for any duplication.  Please note that
>since COMSAT is now much sturdier (anyone interested in the gory details
>may direct queries to ANTIQUE-MAIL@AI), it is now again able to deal with
>fairly large messages, extensive mailing lists, and combinations thereof.