The DNS change that solved the MSN.COM mail delivery problem has now propagated and expired from caches, and just about everyone has confirmed that mail is now coming in. We diagnosed the problem yesterday evening with the MSN Escalation Team after noticing that there was something wrong with the DNS data for MSN.COM. As you know, MSN technical support had been telling people that the lack of incoming mail was due to known problems with the MSN.COM servers and that these problems were being worked on with high priority, so everyone assumed that this was indeed the case and that the best thing to do was to give them a break and let them spend their time working in peace rather than answering questions and not getting any work done. But the problem that they had been referring to was unrelated (at least we think so). Due to a shortage of accurate, unemotional, first-hand information :-), it took a few hours to pin-point the exact cause and location of the problem, but once this was done MSN promptly fixed the problem. As it was a DNS change, it may not have expired from caches until about now. It is of course very unfortunate that problem resolution was delayed because MSN technical support was seeing the same symptoms as for another problem and providing the same stock answer, but in all fairness to them this DNS problem was far beyond the knowledge of any level 1 support person, or even a junior level 2 person. Remember that MSN technical support deals mainly with questions from people who need help installing their modem or configuring their mail client, etc. There must be thousands of people calling every day to explain that they aren't getting their mail, most of the time because their client is not configured properly. Much as I think this should not have happened, I am not really sure how one could train a level 1 person to tell these problems from the one that was reported or the one for which they had the boilerplate about ongoing changes. Maybe some kind of pattern analysis, a sudden surge of complaints from avid mailing list users triggering a more in-depth investigation, something like that. Either way, once it got to the right people it was processed promptly. They were not aware of the problem at all because the complaints had been identified as being something else that involves entirely different people. Likewise there was no reason for anyone to doubt the original diagnostic until enough time had passed that it was starting to sound more and more suspicious. Anyway, if your users are still experiencing the problem by tomorrow morning US time, please let me know so that we can investigate. Eric