[chriscl]

I suppose we'll all have to bear in mind that as nobody (or only the *very* lucky) have been able to actually access their email for the last couple of days, there will, without doubt, be a humongous backlog of email sat around waiting to be delivered.

Of course, this is going to put even more load on the already struggling servers.

In addition, if mail sent to your "@ntlworld.com" account has been "bounced" (i.e. declined by the server due to unavailability, time-outs, what have you) then that mail (depending on the policy of the sending server...) may attempt to retry its delivery also....putting further load on the servers!

If it's true as I believe that the mail has been down for nearly a full day, then we're all going to have some lag until the outstanding mail queues have been cleared (this depends on how many servers they have and how they are configured).

I know we'd all like to call for the head of whoever runs NTL's mail servers, but to be honest, (and I know 'cause I design these sorts of things for a living!) that you can only guess at your peak throughput of mail traffic, until you've seen your domain in use. There are few magic "rules of thumb" for mail servers - mostly, it's a case of experience telling you much server capacity to deploy for a given number of users. You can't calculate for an unknown amount of mail - you just don't know how much mail you'll get until you put your domain out there - and don't even broach the subject of NTL and spam!

While the NTL techies may be monitoring the servers devoutly, if they have no funds to upgrade or add new servers, then we're all going to suffer in the short term!

So yes, we can cuss NTL and demand action, but unless Roman Abramovich decides to give up on Chelsea and buy NTL, I think our best bet is to bear with it until they deploy the "new" mail service - I would hope in the light of all the preceding problems, they do this sooner rather than later!

</sermon>

;-)