The Postman Only Rings… NOT

We still don’t have email service, but our ISP is making progress.

The intramural email service is still functioning, and we get occasional progress reports the boss. It’s a small outfit, so the notes the owner sends out to his customers are more than just terse techie-memos — he goes out of his way to be entertaining.

Here’s the latest from him (in which he lists his title as “Officer in Charge of Yawning”):

In the past 24 hours, I have been working on creating the new inbound mailserver. The hardware itself is now up and running; everything is looking good so far. I just gave it a command which will take several hours to complete, so I’m going to go grab a nap while it cooks. When this phase is complete, we’ll have a brand new server up and running the latest Gentoo Linux distribution. The next step will be for me to teach the generic server how to be a mail server. It will not give me too much argument over that, and will prove to be a model student. I repeat, it will NOT ARGUE with me over this.

God willin’ and if the creek don’t rise.

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On the bright side, since I had to build it from scratch anyway, it will incorporate a few long-awaited upgrades. A majority of the improvements won’t be directly visible to customers but will really help things behind the scenes. Of course, there are a few other improvements which will be immediately obvious to you. For reasons of dramatic suspense, I’ll tell you more about that later (it has absolutely nothing to do with my current fatigue level, nope, not at all).

One interesting note is that I managed to recover all the spam, I mean mail, which had arrived on the mailserver but had not yet been delivered to your spam quarantine, I mean mailboxes. So, despite the catastrophic failure and lengthy outage, we are able to retain our title of never having actually lost a single customer email, a little tidbit I gain a measure of pride in. Although, maybe I shouldn’t mention this until the new server is actually ready and I actually re-inject the pending mail. While I know that its bad luck to be superstitious, I don’t wanna take the chance of jinxing things.