FW: Help!!!

Mon Mar 7 14:44:53 AKST 2005

In a message dated 3/7/2005 5:10:55 PM Central Standard Time,  
rcsteve at tcrcm.org writes:

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_ (mailto:BUDDYonRC at aol.com) 
Message-ID: <_1a4.33132eee.2f5ce2a5 at aol.com_ 
(mailto:1a4.33132eee.2f5ce2a5 at aol.com) >
Date:  Sun, 6 Mar 2005 17:48:05 EST
Subject: Help!!!
To: _discussion at nsrca.org_ (mailto: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

No Steve
I am not getting through I have been booted and when I try to sign up again  
I Get a reply Journal that says I cannot be added to the discussion mailing  
list: error-518979585
I dont know why or how to fix the problem. I left a message For ED Hartly  on 
the NSRCA site
I got ahold of AOL and reset Spam filters they couldnt find a reason that  it 
wont work nor can I my mail works everywhere else.
Buddy
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