Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2008 16:06:57 -0800
Reply-To: John Goubeaux <john@UCSB.EDU>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: John Goubeaux <john@UCSB.EDU>
Organization: UCSB
Subject: Re: No emails!!!
In-Reply-To: <47AE25C2.8040003@gmail.com>
Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
I have not seen any issues with gmail (not to say that there aren't
any). We deliver a large amount of mail to both yahoo and gmail and i
noticed substantial delays in outbound mail destined for yahoo last
Fall. I have heard the same from some large isps/universities confirming
this and it is still happening. How gmail and yahoo handle spam, and or
attempt to slow it down and drop connections are beyond me, and trying
to get anyone to talk to you there is like trying to get an appointment
with the pope. It looks like yahoo is using some sort of what is often
referred to as "grey listing" where you just deny (or throttle back)
connections from certain MTAs knowing that the legit ones will try again
later and spammers will often not. One big problem with this is that
folks are used to mail delivery taking minutes and this can make it
take hours or maybe days? It's not a very sophisticated method of
handling spam but it tends to be effective. But think about it for a
minute, you are gmail and you see a connection from gerry.vanagon.com
that attempts to send to hundreds, maybe more of your users (all at
once), this might be reason to throttle back or delay the connection as
this is how spammers deliver mail.
I don't know qmail too well ( we use mostly sun jes and sendmail) and I
don't know how gerry.vanagon.com list "hooks into it" and if, when
mail can't be delivered, if the list server software holds it and
retries, or the MTA (qmail) queues it and attempts to deliver on some
regular interval for some determined period (the standard is 4 days) If
it is the former, then maybe there is a bunch of mail clogging the
listserve and it needs some attention. It sounds like what Jim did last
yr might be in order again and or some tests to see when and where
things are hanging up.
-john
Michael Elliott wrote:
> How about gmail -- my list messages cut off for more than 24 hours
> earlier this week (but not non-gerry messages), lurched forward and
> caught up, slowly passed on smatterings of older messages, cut off,
> re-started, and maybe seems to be working fine now for gerry stuff.
> Other gmail users have reported the same thing -- again, no problem
> with non-gerry messages.
>
> When this happened last year Jim Arnott took a look and found that
> some logfiles -- or maybe it was gerry's gutters? -- needed cleaning.
> Once they were cleaned, things returned to normal. Didn't improve the
> /quality/ of gerry traffic, but traffic was back up to speed. I don't
> know if Jim can do anything about the quality thing. I know I'm not
> helping.
>
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