mail.blacknight.com / smtpr1.cp.blacknight.com connection problems

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Summary: As a knock on from Mondays major issues we've been experiencing intermittent high load on our Qmail cluster. Symptoms may include disconnections on pop, timouts while sending e-mail and general mail slowness. The queue levels are perfectly fine so delivery of e-mail isn't being badly affected.

We understand that this is frustrating and we are working towards a fix. Most of the issues stem from each slight "outage", be it 1 or 2 minutes or a little more where connections aren't accepted. Once the system starts accepting email again we effectively end up getting DDOS by our customers. We believe there is an underlying bug that a recent Qmail upgrade may have introduced. We hope to get a fix for this today.