My backup MX mail server arctic.thebmwz3.co.uk has had issues recently, holding up my outgoing and incoming mails. I only discovered this today (07/06/2006) so there may be a large backlog of mail to work through!

Apologies to anyone whose mail has been stuck on this server, all of the stuck mails have been delivered, none were lost.

The problem lay in the mail scanning system (that checks for virii and spam). Due to a debian package upgrade, the system changed permissions on the mailbox folders, preventing mailscanner from checking the mail. Thereby leaving it in the holding queue, untouchable by sendmail to send the messages out, and also untouchable by mailscanner to process the messages.

I've now changed the permissions and put a check in place to ensure it doesn't happen again.