Mail/Internet problems

[Shannon C. Dealy]

Since a number of you have been having mail problems recently, I thought I
should address this issue so you will understand what is going on.

First off, there was very little traffic on the coblist last week which is
why you didn't receive much.

Second, while I have had problems in the past with the mail system on my
server, they have been corrected, and there have been NO problems with the
server for several weeks (including this last weekend).

Many of you have received mail from the cob list that failed and was
manually forwarded by me, this is not due to a problem with my system, but
is rather due to either stability problems with the Internet, or in many
cases due to mistakes made by system administrators on the systems which
handle the mail on your end.

One fairly common (and irritating) problem occurs when system
administrators leave the mail system running but disable the user
information while doing maintenance.  This results in all mail to
that system being sent back to me with the message that there is no such
user (America On Line did this a few weeks ago).

Problems due to internet instability are normally dealt with by trying to
send mail messages repeatedly at timed intervals until they are
successfully transmitted.  Unfortunately, some types of errors during
transmission are not easily recovered from, so they are sent to me for
disposition.  This means that if I am not around, some messages will not
get to their destination until I get back.

In addition to the above, just to make things complicated, I have an
alternate mail path to my network which allows mail for my server to be
delivered to a system in another state in the event that the section of
the Internet that I am on is unreachable.  This system is contacted
directly by phone once per day.  Because of this, if you send mail to the
coblist at a time when my server is unreachable, it may get routed to this
alternative system and be delayed for up to 24 hours.

I am working on a fix to automate the process of resending your messages
without my intervention, but I probably won't have time to deal with it
for several weeks, and there are some problems this still won't be able to
handle.

Ultimately there is not much either you or I can do about some of these
problems, you just need to keep in mind the following:

   It can take over 24 hours for your message to get here even if the
   network is working reasonably well.  This is not common, but it does
   happen at least once a week.

   If there is a problem reaching your section of the net from here, it
   can sometimes (this is very rare) take several days for mail to you to
   be delivered.

   If a message to you fails, it won't get to you until I get a chance
   to handle it (this could take up to 10 days when I am at the Natural
   Building Colloquium later this month).

   If you think that you have missed some messages, they can be retrieved
   from the archives by sending email to "majordomo at deatech.com" with the
   following line in the body of the message:

       get coblist cob.archive.YYMM

   where YY is the last two digits of the year and MM is the month
   (January = 01, February = 02, etc.) in which the message(s) were sent.
   This does force you to get a month worth of messages at a time, but we
   haven't had that much traffic yet.  You can also get a complete set of
   commands for accessing information on the mailing list by sending the
   command:

       help

   in the body of a message to "majordomo at deatech.com".  This will cause 
   the help file to be emailed to you.


Hope this answers your questions on the peculiarities of email.  Now
hopefully I can get some time to do the next installment of my cob howto.
I'd do it now, but it's after 5 am (late even for me), and my fingers are
starting to have trouble finding the right keys.


Shannon Dealy
dealy at deatech.com