The Mail Archive on hold this week

Since yesterday morning, incoming mail processing has been on hold.  All 
mail is queueing and will be processed when we can turn things back on.  
Unfortunately, we won't be able to turn the mail processing back on for 
the whole week.

We had hoped we would've had our new large capacity drives installed by 
now, but the drives were back-ordered and haven't shown up yet.  We 
found a new vendor that has them in stock and are rushing the delivery 
this week so we can get them in next weekend.

As part of our preparation for the new drives, we are creating brand new 
filesystem partitions.  We usually do partition copies when moving data 
around because it's fast (on the order of 5 to 8 hours).  However, the 
filesystem partitions for The Mail Archive have existed and been moved 
around for years.  We want to have a clean partition for the first time 
in a long time and this requires a slower recursive file copy.  We 
started the file copy yesterday to a large raid partition.  At its 
current rate, we're projecting it to take another 5 to 7 days to 
finish.  As soon as it is done we will install the new 400GB drives in 
the disk array and move the new partition over.  Once that is done, we 
will begin processing the mail that has been on hold.  Therefore it 
might take an additional couple days to catch up on the mail backlog.

Again, we're sorry about having the system on hold for such a long 
period of time.  We tried setting up a few alternate solutions to make 
the transition seamless but we ran into problems with those options.  
This will be good for the long-term health of the service.

Jeff Marshall
[email protected]