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Re: slow list? [Was: Re: cvs diff, proposal for change]


From: Greg A. Woods
Subject: Re: slow list? [Was: Re: cvs diff, proposal for change]
Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2003 23:22:11 -0400 (EDT)

[ On Thursday, September 4, 2003 at 18:24:51 (+0200), Andreas Klauer wrote: ]
> Subject: slow list? [Was: Re: cvs diff, proposal for change]
>
> Is it just me or is the mailing list extremely slow?

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past month you'll know
that there's another major rash of rather nasty e-mail viruses and worms
going around in the M$ OS world.

Unfortunately these new strains seem to be causing a lot of more bounces
to be returned and since "gnu.org" exists in one heck of a lot of
people's address books, and since these worms all use forged sender
addresses gleaned from address books, the result has been a deluge of
mail on the gnu.org, fsf.org, and prep.ai.mit.edu mailers (which among
many other tasks also handle lists like this one).

A post-script note was attached to an announcement sent out to the
developers on the gnu-prog list recently to let us all know about the
extent of the problem and to let us know that time it was taking to deal
with the worm traffic was adversely affecting the efforts to clean up
after the gnuftp and fencepost cracks.  I suppose a note about this
could have been sent out to all the other lists too.

Of course this wouldn't be such a big problem (even in the fact of the
inevitable worms and viruses) if really ignorant software designers
weren't allowed to write programs that handle e-mail.  Far too many
virus checkers and broken-by-design mailers are sending bounce messages
instead of outright rejecting unwanted messages at the initial SMTP
connection.  All these extra unnecessary bounces are drastically
affecting even those of us who are aware enough of the risks that we
don't ever dare run any M$ software.

> I first thought it was a problem with my mail provider, but you're the second 
> person on the list now who sent mails twice, which tells me that other people 
> seem to have this problem, too.

You should know that e-mail only rarely ever gets lost (unless your
mailer is really royally screwed up, or unless your mail looks a lot
like it contains a virus payload a receiveing mailer along the way
decides to silently drop it in the bit bucket instead of rejecting it
immediately during SMTP).  You shouldn't try resending anything until
either you've recieved a bounce message or at least a week has gone by
since you tried to post (many mailers will keep trying for 5-7 days
before they send you the bounce, though the three days necessary to get
past a long weekend is a more common delay).

-- 
                                                Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                  VE3TCP            RoboHack <address@hidden>
Planix, Inc. <address@hidden>          Secrets of the Weird <address@hidden>




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