Apologies for the 'test' email but for some reason none of the messages that I've sent to the list this morning about the next meeting have appeared and it is a big problem.
Other messages *have* appeared, sent both before and after the missing messages, e.g. the report on yesterday's meeting and the test message.
I have tried sending posts with and without urls.
I have tried changing the smpt server (i.e. the authenticated server from the host for toufol.com amd the mail server for my ISP) and although both work normally for other messages, they do not for the posts in question. Very odd.
When I queried this before it was suggested that it may be an ISP problem but I would have thought that using different smtp servers from different ISP/hosting companies would be a check on this?
Can anyone suggest anything here? What could cause some emails to completely disappear when other messages to the same address and from the same account do arrive?
It is very frustrating to waste so much time just sending out a simple announcement! There were no problems until a month ago when I was trying to announce the April meeting and there seem to be no problems with any other messages - apart from one that was lost on friday which was presumably due to the dns situation for part of the day.
Now to see if this one gets through.
Syd
On 2004-05-03 12:29:46 +0100 Syd Hancock syd@toufol.com wrote:
Apologies for the 'test' email but for some reason none of the messages that I've sent to the list this morning about the next meeting have appeared and it is a big problem.
It seems that I was wrong yesterday. Emails that were sent to the lists during the changed nameservers have been lost. This probably affects most of Friday and some of Saturday. Maybe it still affects some particularly badly configured ISPs. Any affected emails should have got an error, but if not, assume that I can't find where it went and you won't be far wrong.
Can anyone suggest anything here? What could cause some emails to completely disappear when other messages to the same address and from the same account do arrive?
Phase of the moon?
Seriously, first check that they really left your machine and get the message-IDs. Then ask your mailserver admins (for you are their customer) whether it got through their servers. Maybe ask mailman-owner at lists.alug.org.uk (Noodles?) if the message-IDs concerned ever arrived, but I assume not as they didn't get to the list. Then look at the email headers of a successful list post from you and try asking postmasters at the other common mailservers on their paths between you and the lists to see where your lost messages vanished. Not fun and not fast, but it's the only debugging method that seems obvious to me.
On Monday 03 May 2004 11:49 pm, MJ Ray wrote: [... big snip]
. Not fun and not fast, but it's the only debugging method that seems obvious to me.
OK, thanks for the suggestions. Strangely when I rewrote the messages from scratch they arrived with no problem so I have no idea what could be happening.
The most important thing is that the announcement is now made - if I have future problems I may try and track down the reason. More pressing things to be done at the moment, unfortunately!
Syd
On Tuesday 04 May 2004 09:08, Ted Harding wrote:
From time to time I have problems with mails taking a long time (several hours, occasionally 2-3 days) to reach some mailing lists.
Inspection of the headers when the mails finally arrive shows pretty unambiguously that btinternet have sat on them for that time. I have no clue why this happens. When it does hapen, it tends to happen in clusters.
I have had a few problems like this with BT, there seems to be a lack of consistent behaviour across their server pool.
Recently I had a problem with a client (who had a mail setup that sent mail from a different domain to that of the reply/sender address), they were getting mails sent to me (on BTinternet at work) rejected due to an invalid domain. Yet only about 50% of the mails were rejected the others got through.
Also I have had similar problems at work where sometimes the BT mail relays will not let me send as our website domain (hosted at ghoulnet) and then later would. Fortunately I found a form you can fill in on the BT website to correct that.
I have a feeling that BT are experimenting with several spam and virus propergation prevention measures. Be nice if they told us beforehand though.
On Tuesday 04 May 2004 5:50 am, Syd Hancock wrote:
OK, thanks for the suggestions. Strangely when I rewrote the messages from scratch they arrived with no problem so I have no idea what could be happening.
I have a horrible feeling that everyone who knows how mailing systems work is going to groan and say 'well, of course... didn't you know that' but something has just occurred to me. The messages that were not delivered were sent by choosing a previous message from the sent-mail folder and selecting 'send again'.
Cough - does that mean that the mail system will reject it as having been already received? Does it have the same message- id (or something like that) as the original message even though I have edited the contents?
Syd
On 2004-05-09 15:11:10 +0100 Syd Hancock syd@toufol.com wrote:
Cough - does that mean that the mail system will reject it as having been already received? Does it have the same message- id (or something like that) as the original message even though I have edited the contents?
It is possible that your mail client doesn't update the message-id and it is possible (maybe even valid) that some server would ignore it. Some versions of Mailman definitely do funny things with bad Message-IDs. Maybe you can test this by sending a mail to yourself, then "send again" it to yourself and see whether it changed the ID (or if it arrives at all!).
On 2004.05.03 12:29, Syd Hancock wrote:
Can anyone suggest anything here? What could cause some emails to completely disappear when other messages to the same address and from the same account do arrive?
The only reason I can think of is SPAM filtering, though off the top of my head I cannot work out why a meeting announcement or report would look like SPAM.
Steve.
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MJ Ray -
Steve Fosdick -
Syd Hancock -
Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk -
Wayne Stallwood