[ On Thursday, September 4, 2003 at 18:24:51 (+0200), Andreas Klauer wrote: ] > Subject: slow list? [Was: Re: cvs diff, proposal for change] > > Is it just me or is the mailing list extremely slow?
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past month you'll know that there's another major rash of rather nasty e-mail viruses and worms going around in the M$ OS world. Unfortunately these new strains seem to be causing a lot of more bounces to be returned and since "gnu.org" exists in one heck of a lot of people's address books, and since these worms all use forged sender addresses gleaned from address books, the result has been a deluge of mail on the gnu.org, fsf.org, and prep.ai.mit.edu mailers (which among many other tasks also handle lists like this one). A post-script note was attached to an announcement sent out to the developers on the gnu-prog list recently to let us all know about the extent of the problem and to let us know that time it was taking to deal with the worm traffic was adversely affecting the efforts to clean up after the gnuftp and fencepost cracks. I suppose a note about this could have been sent out to all the other lists too. Of course this wouldn't be such a big problem (even in the fact of the inevitable worms and viruses) if really ignorant software designers weren't allowed to write programs that handle e-mail. Far too many virus checkers and broken-by-design mailers are sending bounce messages instead of outright rejecting unwanted messages at the initial SMTP connection. All these extra unnecessary bounces are drastically affecting even those of us who are aware enough of the risks that we don't ever dare run any M$ software. > I first thought it was a problem with my mail provider, but you're the second > person on the list now who sent mails twice, which tells me that other people > seem to have this problem, too. You should know that e-mail only rarely ever gets lost (unless your mailer is really royally screwed up, or unless your mail looks a lot like it contains a virus payload a receiveing mailer along the way decides to silently drop it in the bit bucket instead of rejecting it immediately during SMTP). You shouldn't try resending anything until either you've recieved a bounce message or at least a week has gone by since you tried to post (many mailers will keep trying for 5-7 days before they send you the bounce, though the three days necessary to get past a long weekend is a more common delay). -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP RoboHack <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Planix, Inc. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Secrets of the Weird <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ Info-cvs mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-cvs