[dba-SQLServer] PLEASE READ

[Bryan Carbonnell]

Hey Folks,

I think we are back in business. There may be some speed bumps along
the way, but things are looking better from my end. In case you hadn't
noticed, all of DBA's lists have been down for about 3 weeks.

Several things contributed to this LONG outage.

1) We were getting a TON of bounce backs, which flagged the server
with Gmail, MS (Hotmail, Outlook, etc), Yahoo and AOL and all their
associated servers. This is the one that took time to clean up, and
I'm not 100% sure that it is fully fixed, but it's looking like it is.

2) My Mum passed away from complications due to Covid-19 just before
Christmas. That kind of took me out of the loop for a bit, needless to
say.

3) The holidays came and went.

4) It looked like we were getting hit by a DDOS on our mail server as
well. 10's of thousands of connections to the mailing lists per day!

Where do we stand?

I have made some necessary changes to the list configurations to deal
with some of these issues.

1) ALL moderation emails go to listmaster at databaseadvisors.com for now.

2) Because of #1, if your emails are too big you should get a notice
that it is being held. You will need to trim and resend because I will
NOT be able to get to them to let them through. If it is still too
big, turn off HTML/RICH TEXT email and send in PLAIN text only. If you
are STILL having problems after all that, reach out to me at
listmaster at databaseadvisors.com.

3) If you post from the wrong address, all those emails will
automatically be discarded. No notice to you or me. If you are
concerned about if a post made it to the list, check the list
archives. http://databaseadvisors.com/pipermail/dba-sqlserver/

4) I have disabled ALL the lists. I will slowly be reenabling the
various lists, one per day over the next little while just to make
sure that we don't end up sliding back too far. So far the ones back
online are AccessD, OT and now DBA-SQLServer

5) DO NOT send test messages to any list, please. This can contribute
to problems if we are having them. Check the archive or email me
directly (carbonnb at gmail.com or listmaster at databaseadvisors.com). I
can't stress this one enough.

So this is the long and roundabout way to say, we can start using the
lists again. Be gentle and don't flood the lists.

Bryan
Your Friendly Neighbourhood Listmaster

-- 
Bryan Carbonnell - carbonnb at gmail.com
Life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a
well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out,
shouting "What a great ride!"