Re: querky digest

[Richard Welty <rwelty@domain.elided>]

At 12:04 PM 11/23/97 -0500, TERNOV@domain.elided wrote:
>I'm sure many people have mentioned this, and I'm also sure Richard is doing
>everything he can to correct such querks, but today I recieved diges 31 and
>35. I still haven't gotten 32, 33, 34, and a handful of digests in the 20's.

aol has been having serious mail problems over the past week. i don't have any
real power to correct these glitches.

>Every digest needs to be downloaded, meaning I have to quit AOL, open the
>digest, read the whole thing, decide if I want to respond or not, and if I
>do, I have to sign back on to AOL and re-open that mail. This requires
>remembering what digest contained said info that I want to respond to, as
>well as which message it was that I wanted to respond to and what that
>message said. Its a sucky process. 

the download process is imposed by aol.  there are several viable options here:

1) switch to individual message format, which aol will handle better, but you'll
still get erratic delivery

2) switch to a different service provider

3) pick up an account on krusty-motorsports.com and download a copy of pegasus
mail to use reading the digest.

>So I figured maybe Rich is still having
>problems with the new server. I don't know if anyone else is having similar
>problems, but I figured I might as well let eveyone know.

the new server is actually functioning very well. aol's mail system is spastic
on good days, and i'm not even going to try and describe the bad days, as it
would involve "impolite" language.

what happens with out of order messages is this:

the mail transport agent (we're using exim, an alternative to the traditional
sendmail, URL is http://www.exim.org/) attempts a delivery. if a temporary
failure
occurs (common with aol), then the message is left in the outgoing queue and
a pattern
of retrys is attempted. this pattern runs for several days, and includes a
forced
retry of aol at 2:10am eastern time every morning.

once the initial delivery attempt fails, there is no longer any certainty of the
order in which retrys will be attempted, and so out of order messages will
become
the norm if you're using a system like aol which often temporarily rejects
incoming
mail. one of the problems with the old sendmail system on wizvax was that
sendmail
tends to stick on bad addresses; exim gets around this by deliberately
randomizing
what messages get retried first, so in some sense, it's not a bug, it's a
feature...

richard
-- 
Richard Welty                                             518-783-9003 (days)
rwelty@domain.elided              http://www.krusty-motorsports.com/
welty@domain.elided (<== real job)        http://www.inet-solutions.net/