And it is a pain in the ar$e.

 

Strange, I've just sent myself (at work) 4+ Mb of attachments through my BTOpenworld mailbox, and it went through without a hitch.

Must have been a temporary glitch - we seem to get some, though in general it's very good.

 

HaHa - it was probably XRS sending those 4Mb that brought the servers down

 

BT uses a partitioned mail system.
Some mailboxes are on one server and some on others.
There used to be 4 MSS (mail message stores) with a spread of 2 million accounts across them.
This is done for resilience, so that in the event of a hardware failure the number of users affected is reduced.
Unfortunately though sometimes things do fail, and this looks like it may have occured in this instance.
You most likely would still be able to send mail when your mailstore is down because it will use one of the SMTP servers, so it's quite possible that for Paul mail was down when he tried to POP it, and for XRS it looked to be up (either because his mailstore was on a different host, or because he was just sending mail with SMTP).

Thought a bit of a technical description might help here, hope you are still awake ;-)