FW: Help!!!

[RC Steve Sterling]

Hi Buddy-- don't worry, your messages are coming through. This list uses
email, and email can have some strange excentricities.

Email goes through email servers, one on each end. In the situation of the
list server, add in a third server in the middle.

Any of the servers can get busy, bogged down. Here is an example:

Lets say you have sent out a message to the list server. Your email program
does not talk directly to the nsrca list server, it hands the email off to
an email server provided by your ISP (in this case AOL).  Your ISP's mail
server then queues up your message until it has time to try and contact the
nsrca server. Depending how busy it is, this could be 1 second, minutes, or
in rare cases (during a spam storm) hours.

Once your ISP server has time, it will try to contact the nsrca mail server.
If the nsrca server is not busy, the message is transferred, and queued for
send out to the list members. If it is busy (maybe with other nsrca list
stuff, but could be one or more of their other commercial clients--nscra
just rents space from an ISP) then it sends a short message back to your ISP
server "busy-wait". So AOL's server puts it in a delay queue, and after it
takes care of the other 15 million client messages waiting in its queues,
tries again. Oh, but it gets another busy-wait message, it doubles the delay
time and waits again.  With busy traffic, and doubling of the delay time for
each busy-wait times, messages can get wait-delay times 24 hours or longer.

This same process can happen on the distribution of the message out to the
list members as well. For example, when the nsrca server tried to contact
the AOL server, if it got a wait-busy reply, it puts the message to you in a
wait queue and goes on through the rest of the list before trying again.

Of course, some other problems can occur as well. In the past, we have had
AOL's automated spam filtering think that email from the list was spam and
started blocking it.

Looking the email header info from your last message, it looks like it took
2 seconds for AOL's server to receive the message from you. It then took 6
more seconds for it to deliver it to the nsrca server. Pretty quick,
obviously no delay here. It rumbles around through several spam and virus
checkers at nsrca's ISP for a few seconds. Then it hits a server that's
clock is 1+ hour off so who knows. Finally, NSRCA's servers shoot it to my
server 1 minute and 3 seconds after you had hit the send button.

So it got to me very fast. My best guess is that AOL's incoming servers were
swamped (there is a spam storm going on this weekend), they told the NSRCA
server to wait-delay a couple of times, and now your message is in email
pergatory. It will eventually flush through.

Below is a copy of the route list of your message that got to me. Its kind
of interesting.  You read it from the bottom up. Each of the "Received:"
lines is another server or application (like virus checker) that handled the
message.

Steve Sterling
NSRCA Webteam

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From: BUDDYonRC at aol.com
Message-ID: <1a4.33132eee.2f5ce2a5 at aol.com>
Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2005 17:48:05 EST
Subject: Help!!!
To: discussion at nsrca.org

-----Original Message-----
From: discussion-request at nsrca.org [mailto:discussion-request at nsrca.org]On
Behalf Of BUDDYonRC at aol.com
Sent: Sunday, March 06, 2005 2:48 PM
To: discussion at nsrca.org
Subject: Help!!!


If anyone can help? I am getting mail from everyone that mails me direct but
nothing from the discussion list. I am beginning to think I have been cut
off due to recent rules change discussions that I started.
Please let me back on I won't do it again.
Buddy
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