That was bad enough, especially since this happened during the close of the reading period for the Older Writers' Grant. But we came up with a plan for coping with it as best we could -- we reset the reading period entirely, and we were about to send out a ton of publicity trying to make as many people as possible aware of what had happened. But then our SLF e-mail started failing -- most importantly, the forward for the Older Writers grant applications. ARGH.
I spent three hours last night trying to fix it on-site, and failing. And then combing through 5000 messages of stored mail, mostly junk, trying to find any applications. I dug out quite a few addresses. And then I submitted a ticket to our ISP saying essentially WHAT THE HELL.
This morning I heard back from Aaron (hi, Aaron), saying this: "It seems the messages are being stored locally on the server as though there was a mailbox instead of a forwarding recipe. I do not see any problem with the forwards configured within your account, and will escalate this issue. You will receive another response as soon as we have more information available."
So, I guess we have some sense of what the problem is, but no idea why the problem exists? So we sit on our hands and wait. All I can say is, I can now see why so many of the old-school fiction editors resisted taking electronic subs. It would be very comforting having a big stack of paper manuscripts on my desk right now.
Sorry, everyone. Have patience with us, please. More info as we have it.
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