A short note

We had a catastrophic failure of our mail server over the weekend. We lost both drives and the server won’t boot past the BIOS stage. Most of the weekend was spent on recovery and restoration, and we expect to have mail restored today. In the meantime, if you need to get a hold of me I’m available on AIM as wttwlaura and can be reached at my gmail account: wttwlaura.
This does mean I have the opportunity *ahem* to re-organized mail and my mail handling work flow. What better time to move to zero inbox than now when I have to rebuild my sieve scripts from scratch?
UPDATE: mail is back and I can be reached at the normal places, including through our contact link.

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It’s not perfect, I’m still getting spam to that address. But it’s spam at a level where I’m not losing real mail.

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May everyone traveling have safe journeys. Happy Christmas.

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