CENT@mit-ai.ARPA (Pandora B. Berman) (05/19/86)
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.