Jim went to Colorado for a week on business, and in accordance with Murphy’s Law his internet connection went down, or at least appeared to. The web sites were offline, and worse, the mail server was unreachable. As a temporary fix, I rerouted all incoming mail to another linux box that had postfix running and returned to reading mail in pine for a week.

We use Amavis and Spamassassin for system-wide spam tagging, and then individual users use procmail for additional filtering and tossing mail to folders. These filters have been in place for a couple of years at least, so the return to no filtering was a shock. My email inbox became almost unusable as a flood of spam, viruses, and bounces for spam I didn’t send filled it. Over the course of the week I received several hundred messages of which about 20 were important.

We’ve been talking about setting up redundancy on the systems for 18 months now, but it’s always been bumped by more important (and not-so-important ) distractions. Manually filtering spam for a week has renewed my interest in getting redundancy in place.