An extremely long message posted to one of the BlitzMail bulletins caused the College's electronic-mail system to crash Tuesday and Wednesday for students monitoring that group's bulletin.
When students monitoring the group's bulletin signed on to their accounts, BlitzMail immediately shut down, according to Jim Matthews, chief programmer for Computing Services and one of BlitzMail's developers.
Matthews said Computing Services fixed the problem by about 4:00 p.m. yesterday by removing the bulletin. But Matthews said the problem indicated a glitch in the BlitzMail program that will eventually need to be fixed.
"We were lucky to find the flaw so fast," Matthews said. "Bulletin posters must now keep this problem in mind until we are able to fix the program."
Although Matthews refused to name the group that posted the long bulletin, he said people who monitor bulletin groups with long messages increase their vulnerability to BlitzMail crashes.
Matthews said technicians at the Kiewit Computation Center originally did not know the reason for the breakdown.
"We did not know if the problem was the software or something else," he said. "We had not seen anything like this before."
In the past, BlitzMail breakdowns were caused by individual students' computers and not the BlitzMail software itself, Matthews said.
Most of the people who reported BlitzMail failures were using versions 2.03 and 2.05 of BlitzMail. No one using version 2.04 reported a failure, Matthews said.
"We had multiple people collecting information from those who had 'crashed' computers," Matthews said. "The technicians began working on the problem as soon as we received our first report."
