ANNOUNCEMENT: Sluggish Saturday

Hello,

As you may already have noticed, Sandy's responsiveness was less than stellar this morning.

Sandy experienced a very sudden influx of new clients which took her, us, and our spam firewall by surprise. In fact, Sandy herself was responding in a timely manner. The bottleneck was in our spam firewall which was suddenly introduced to a whole host of people it had never heard of before and so did just what it was supposed to do and dutifully shuffled through all the incoming email.

So where did all these new clients come from? It seems a lovely article over at Fast Company titled "The Top 10 Websites You Never Heard Of" [http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2...] was featured on the home page of MSN this morning. (A quick shout-out to Chris Dannen and April Joyner for the props!)

We've spent the past couple of hours working with both that spam firewall to get it up to speed on all these newcomers and convince it to hand things off to Sandy as quickly as possible. She's now flying through her inbox as quickly as the mail is coming in and playing catch-up on some of those messages that were held up in transit.

You probably also noticed a delay in some of your expected Daily Digests and reminders. Those reminders too were jammed in the rising mail flow. We worked quickly this morning to further dissociate incoming and outgoing email so that an influx of email to Sandy should not affect the delivery of your reminders in this manner again.

So where are we?

Well, there's still quite a bottleneck that we'll continue working to relieve. The good news is that this is about the most upgradeable part of our infrastructure. The less-than-perfect news is that, for today at least, it is just going to have to work its way through the queue before things return completely to normal.

As much as you plan for capacity, every web service has a day like today — and nobody, from startup to Fortune 500, is immune. (I say this, mind you, not by way of excuse, but just as a little perspective. We take our jobs very seriously here and do all we can to ensure a smooth, useful, and enjoyable experience for all of Sandy's clients.)

Bottom line: what does this mean for you and your correspondence with Sandy?

* Your email will be received (it won't be bounced or lost), but there will be a delay in Sandy dealing with it.
* You won't receive a reply from Sandy right away when you send her email.
* Anything you email or twitter involving relative time (ex. "in 15 minutes" or "in an hour") will be off, I'm afraid, by however long the delay was.
* Reminders will have been rather late today, but this should return to normal over the course of the day.
* You may experience a slow-down (from sheer traffic) when you visit Sandy's site at http://iwantsandy.com.
* You may see some delay in receiving email responses to your Jotts to Sandy.
* You may see some delay in email responses to your Twittered tweets to Sandy. She will, however, twitter back within her usual < 30 seconds or so.

I apologize for any inconvenience this is causing you and appreciate your continued patience and understanding as we weather out this bumpy patch.

In the meantime, if you've been one of Sandy's clients for a little while, we'd love it if you could make your new neighbors feel at home, help them out (answer questions on GetSatisfaction if you're able), and reassure them that this truly isn't the normal state of things.

I will report back throughout this "Sluggish Saturday" with updates.

—Rael