hairball

   1.  [Fidonet]  A  large  batch  of  messages that a store-and-forward
   network  is  failing  to  forward  when  it should. Often used in the
   phrase  "Fido  coughed  up  a hairball today", meaning that the stuck
   messages  have  just  come  unstuck,  producing a flood of mail where
   there had previously been drought.

   2. An unmanageably huge mass of source code. "JWZ thought the Mozilla
   effort bogged down because the code was a huge hairball."

   3.  Any  large  amount  of  garbage coming out suddenly. "Sendmail is
   coughing  up  a  hairball,  so  expect  some  slowness  accessing the
   Internet."

[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {mail storm}]