Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2008 09:54:05 -0800
Reply-To: Michael Elliott <camping.elliott@GMAIL.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Michael Elliott <camping.elliott@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: No emails!!!
In-Reply-To: <47AE4021.30608@ucsb.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Hey John -- thanks for sharing what you know about how these things work.
--
Mike "Rocket J Squirrel" Elliott
71 Type 2: the Wonderbus
84 Westfalia: Mellow Yellow ("The Electrical Banana")
74 Utility Trailer. Ladybug Trailer, Inc., San Juan Capistrano
KG6RCR
On 2/9/2008 4:06 PM John Goubeaux wrote:
> 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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