Subject: Re: mail problems
From: Christopher Faylor <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2000 12:13:49 -0500

On Sun, Nov 05, 2000 at 07:36:36AM -0800, Tim Prince wrote:
>Myrealbox and earthlink/mindspring have done a fairly good job for me.
>I generally wait until one service kicks the message back before trying
>another.  That does present annoying delays at times, and I too have
>had messages disappear with no warning.  Cygwin has been one of the
>worst about blocking legitimate posts while allowing spam to come
>through.

I am not sure what other mailing lists you are subscribed to but cygwin
uses exactly the same spam blocking procedures as any other mailing list
on sources.redhat.com.  This includes the gcc.gnu.org lists.

We filter email through a number of open-relay services before it makes
it to any of the sources.redhat.com mailing lists.  Additionally, when I
see spam, I immediately block the sender from future posts here and
report the offender to their ISP, if possible.  I'm often tempted to
additionally block the accounts of people who *respond to the spam* here
since I find the "Hey!  This is SPAM!  Somebody should do something!"
messages more annoying than the SPAM itself.  So far, I've resisted
the urge.

I can't completely explain why the cygwin mailing list gets more spam
than, say, the gdb or gcc mailing lists.  Possibly it is because the
cygwin mailing list is mentioned on more sites which are harvested by
spammers.

This is the *first* that I've heard of disappearing messages.  I have,
personally, never had a message disappear.  I assume that the assumption
by the original poster when he "thought the first message didn't get
through" would have been solved by exercising slightly more patience.
sources.redhat.com does an absolutely amazing job at maintaining good
response time with its mailing lists, owing to its use of qmail/ezmlm,
but sometimes it can take a half an hour or more for email to show up.

If you would like to track down the problem with email disappearing,
send mail to [email-masked], the next time that it
happens with as much information about the message (time, date, subject,
email address, etc.) as you can provide.  I guess it is not obvious
that we will track down problems with our mailing lists if people
provide details that enable us to look into the problems.

cgf

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