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"