At 09:41 PM 8/30/2009, David Kao wrote: >The list was suspicious before. It has nothing to do with the list >in my opinion. It was pointed to Yahoo already before. But the real >cause wasn't clear to me. I believe I know the cause now. I would like >to hear other thoughts though. > >David David, the list itself has been working fine as far as I know, and things coming through in sequence; so it's very unlikely *not* to be something in Yahoo, I think. The way listserv works, it takes one message and sends it to everyone on the list, then the next message to everyone on the list and so on. Having just said that, I take the "unlikely" part back -- There are two main types of errors that can occur in this process (i.e. between the two so-called Mail Transfer Agents, the programs that actually handle the mail -- your email program, if you're using on and not the Yahoo web interface, would be called a Mail User Agent under this scheme); permanent and temporary. In each case the MTA on gerry's end failed to successfully negotiate with the receiving MTA to accept a particular message; but a permanent error means that it's (theoretically) never going to work so the sending agent quits trying. Gerry logs these errors and if you accumulate about sixty of them it unsubscribes you. In the case of a temporary error, which suggests the possibility of future success, the sending agent will try several more times, likely at increasing intervals for four days or so, before declaring a failure. Jim (or theoretically I, i.e. I have the permissions but not the practice -- it's fairly likely that I'll take over the technical stuff from Jim maybe sometime in the spring) can check those logs and see what they reveal, if anything -- I don't know whether they will show temporary errors that were resolved, partly because I don't know whether gerry actually uses its own MTA or one upstream of it. What I see in the message headers suggests that it uses its own, but headers have gotten a lot more complicated since I used to know what they meant. I'll ask Jim to take a look. Cheers, d
-- David Beierl - Providence RI USA -- http://pws.prserv.net/synergy/Vanagon/ '89 Po' White Star "Scamp" |
Please note - During the past 17 years of operation, several gigabytes of
Vanagon mail messages have been archived. Searching the entire collection
will take up to five minutes to complete. Please be patient!
Return to the archives @ gerry.vanagon.com
The vanagon mailing list archives are copyright (c) 1994-2011, and may not be reproduced without the express written permission of the list administrators. Posting messages to this mailing list grants a license to the mailing list administrators to reproduce the message in a compilation, either printed or electronic. All compilations will be not-for-profit, with any excess proceeds going to the Vanagon mailing list.
Any profits from list compilations go exclusively towards the management and operation of the Vanagon mailing list and vanagon mailing list web site.