Anyone trying to visit this site in the last week or more probably noticed we were suffering from severe technical problems. These are (hopefully!) now all fixed and things should be getting back to whatever passes for normal around here!!

For the terminally curious, it appears that a rather shortsighted bit of Exim configuration on the part of our last sysadmin led to an accumulation of over 2500 bounce messages in our outbound mail queue - the regular attempts to re-send them were eating so many system resources that the webserver processes were getting killed for Out of Memory errors.

I've set Exim to dump bounces after one week, restarted it, and our outbound queue is down to a dozen or so items now, which seems much healthier! The server has run fine since that restart (two days and counting), so hopefully it'll all be okay now...