It was written....
> > I am moderately curious why it is taking one to five (or more)
> hours for
> > posts to show up... manual moderation perhaps? If so, I don't envy
> Jay
> > for the task...
The delay depends on a lot of things. Here is some general non-specific
info. First, it fairly frequently happens that someone subscribes to the
list, then gets a different email address, or just posts from a different
one, and to the list it becomes a "non-member" submission. There are also
some regular list contributors who have never bothered to subscribe so their
posts are always manually approved. I TRY to go through all the "posts held
for moderation" twice a day. However, due to work and believe it or not,
tending to MY collection, sometimes I get backlogged for a day or even a
couple days. It's not uncommon for 200+ emails to be waiting moderation (on
each list) each time I do it. It's not a 5 minute affair to go through each
of them and approve/discard them. The list does get hit with pretty
significant amounts of SPAM even with keyword filters further making this
very time consuming.
Another reason for delays is believe it or not a suprisingly large number of
people try to use that "dynamic DNS" crap which is sorely unreliable, or try
to host their own mail or web service on a cable or xDSL or even dialup
(hence the dyndns stuff). WHY do people who get a tiny DSL or cable
connection think it's so cool to run their own services? These connections
were meant for one thing - websurfing (they are asymetric channels) - NOT
mail or web serving or even worse, hosting your own DNS. Unless they are
very carefully watching their mail logs, most of the time they don't even
know that fairly often their mail system isn't reachable. So all the list
emails going to them fill up my mail queue with "timed out waiting to
connect to host....", or "host unreachable...". So often many sets of
complete list traffic sit in my mail queue. The problem is, each time a
sendmail queue runner wakes up on my mail server, it has to go through the
entire mail queue. Not just for regular list traffic but for all these
emails that were rejected by the target server the first time or two, which
delays everyone elses traffic. I suspect I'm running into a "cascading queue
runner" effect, where the queue run times are set fairly short and another
queue runner is started before the first one finishes which compounds the
problem with locking, etc. These people generally are unaware that their
"coolness" effort is affecting others. Sorry for going off on this tangent -
pet peeve.
More often than not, the delays people have seen are the result of other
mail servers along the way, not mine - as was thankfully pointed out in this
posting by the listing of the server hops and transit times. On a couple of
occasions we have had problems on my end I will admit, but most often that's
not the case.
There is definitely some additional tuning to sendmail that I need to do. I
just haven't had the time yet. Right now my personal classiccmp email
address has well over 800 emails in it that are mostly things I need to
address. My work email is much worse. I am truely sorry to the people who
have emailed me and I haven't responded yet, but with those volumes it's
hard to even motivate to start when one gets behind. And I have been behind
lately mostly because I have spent some time with my own collection as of
late. Not to mention the fact that... well, perhaps I am a little irked that
people think a 10 minute post to receive cycle is slow.
Ah well, I'll get there :)
Jay
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Received on Fri Oct 10 2003 - 07:59:58 BST