A week or two ago, the ancient laptop I use as my personal web/mail/fileserver and firewall, suddenly got a bit flaky: it kept running, but all attempts to write to the disk failed. Naturally, this prompted me to get extra conscientious about making sure everything of importance was backed up regularly (my e-mail was already being backed up automatically each day, but I discovered that the MySQL database containing my Wordpress articles was not in the backup set — oops). A reboot fixed the problem, however, so I didn’t run out and get a replacement drive just yet.
However, last Thursday the same thing happened again, and this time after a reboot all I got was the message “primary hard disk not found”. So that’s why my server was unreachable for the past couple of days. It’s quite possible that I lost some mail, too — I have a fallback mailserver through my DNS provider, but I’m not sure that they will have retained everything for three days. If you sent me an e-mail recently and have not received a response yet, please send it again.