simon@mcvax.UUCP (Simon Kenyon) (10/16/85)
every time I post an article to this group I get a nasty message from a mailer saying that arpanet refused a piece of mail. what is going on? -- simon kenyon simon@mcvax
werner@aecom.UUCP (Craig Werner) (10/18/85)
> every time I post an article to this group I get a nasty > message from a mailer saying that arpanet refused a piece of mail. > what is going on? > simon@mcvax Ditto for me, except that it's 4 letters. UCBVAX seems to be the culprit. -- Craig Werner !philabs!aecom!werner "Comedy, like Medicine, was never meant to be practiced by the general public."
kek@mgweed.UUCP (Kit Kimes) (10/21/85)
I had *10* messages waiting for me this morning (Monday) from two articles I posted last week. All were from mailers that failed. I'm sure I'll have several more from this posting. :-( -Kit-
turner@saber.UUCP (D'arc Angel) (10/21/85)
> > every time I post an article to this group I get a nasty > > message from a mailer saying that arpanet refused a piece of mail. > > what is going on? > > simon@mcvax > > Ditto for me, except that it's 4 letters. UCBVAX seems to be the culprit. > -- me three, is there a workaround ???? -- god bless Lily St. Cyr -Rocky Horror Picture Show Name: James Turner Mail: Imagen Corp. 2650 San Tomas Expressway, P.O. Box 58101 Santa Clara, CA 95052-9400 AT&T: (408) 986-9400 UUCP: ...{decvax,ucbvax}!decwrl!imagen!negami!turner
sean@ukma.UUCP (Sean Casey) (10/23/85)
>Various complaints about arpanet messages sent to usenet people because >some arpanet machine couldn't contact another to forward a mailing list. (Put on your asbestos suit. Here it comes.) This is happening to me too. I once had this happen on net.micro.amiga to the point where I was getting 8 junk mail messages a day. This happened for two weeks (until the involved computers decided to give up). Frankly, this pisses me off. This is not the way the software should behave. I would think that arpa sites would be more responsible than that. This is not something that needs to be handled on an individual basis. The software needs to be changed to do more intelligent things when a mailing list can't go to a particular machine. The obviously correct thing to do would be to mail notices to the person responsible for the forwarding instead of sending personal mail to the poster of the message. Gatewaying articles into arpanet is a Nice Thing, but this brain-damaged behavior is costing Usenet people a lot of money. They have to pay real phone bills! I am quite seriously thinking of writing a program to pull such messages out of my mailbox and mail them back to the offending machine. I think maybe if something like that got posted and people started using it then the people responsible would take action to correct it. I wonder how much money has been wasted because of these messages? Think about my case. Eight messages a day containing the entire source of my postings repeated for two weeks. That's 112 junk mails. You want to pay for it? I don't. (You can remove the asbestos suit now.) Sean -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sean Casey UUCP: sean@ukma.UUCP or 915 Patterson Office Tower {cbosgd,anlams,hasmed}!ukma!sean University of Kentucky ARPA: ukma!sean@ANL-MCS.ARPA Lexington, Ky. 40506-0027 BITNET: sean@UKMA.BITNET -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
fair@ucbarpa.BERKELEY.EDU (Erik E. &) (10/25/85)
In article <2323@ukma.UUCP> sean@ukma.UUCP (Sean Casey) writes: >>Various complaints about arpanet messages sent to usenet people because >>some arpanet machine couldn't contact another to forward a mailing list. > >I am quite seriously thinking of writing a program to pull such messages out >of my mailbox and mail them back to the offending machine. I think maybe if >something like that got posted and people started using it then the people >responsible would take action to correct it. Consider yourself lucky. Every message that leaves the USENET from ucbvax bound for an ARPANET mailing list has two headers added to it: Sender: usenet@ucbvax.berkeley.edu Errors-To: usenet@ucbvax.berkeley.edu I'm usenet@ucbvax.berkeley.edu. Imagine my mailbox. If a mailer is implemented properly, it should send error messages back to the `Sender:'. `Errors-To:' is something that sendmail knows about, which I insert as insurance. The offending systems that have been incorrectly routing error messages back to the USENET poster are all TENEX/TWENEX systems. I encourage you to bombard the mailbox postmaster@offending.arpa.host for each error message you receive. If you (and others) lambast the individual postmasters sufficiently, perhaps they will in turn poke the mailer implementer(s) to FIX the damned things. Among other odious behaviour exhibited by these mailers is that they will try an address for three days, and EACH DAY they will send an update if the message has not gotten through. Personally, I only want to know when my message finally fails. Before that, I don't want to hear it! keeper of the network news for ucbvax, and guardian of the gateway, Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fair@ucbarpa.BERKELEY.EDU
MRC@SIMTEL20.ARPA (Mark Crispin) (10/25/85)
Attention:
If any electronic "bombarding" is attempted I will guarantee that
your mailbox will be filled with 100 megabytes of mail. The right
"fix" for the problem is to have somebody maintain INFO-ATARI again.
I am sorry that UUCP is so primitive. I consider myself fortunate
not to have to use it.
-- Mark --
-------jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (10/26/85)
The reason we can't follow your suggestion is simple. A mailing list
like ours is a simple reassignment of names; my name and the names of
the other arpa readers get put in a recipient field, and you are still
the sender (Which is why I can reply to you now.). This is fine for
small groups, as no one has to go through the hassle of moderating the
list. Any mail you send is exactly like sending n messages, one to
each person on the list. You would get a message from the appropriate
mail demon if one of those messages were unsuccessful in getting to its
recipient, and judging from your complaints, this is indeed what has
been happening (Believe me, from a list this size, be glad there are
only eight irresponsible individuals who didn't tell anyone when their
mail addresses changed!). This format was really designed only to
work for a small group. I am on and run several such groups, one for
my living group and its alumni, one for an experimental program I'm
in at school, etc. each with less than 100 people on it. It would be
a real pain to readdress each message 80 times by hand in order to get
to those same people, though. Using this format for a large list,
especially one spread out over the country, is going to run into some
trouble of the sort you just described. That is why there are
digests. Digests are simply all the messages sent to the list put in
a single (long) mail message, so that the recipient can "undigestify"
them and read them. A typical digest will go out two to ten times a week.
The benefit is that the person who "digestifies" (digests?) the
messages is the one who resends them to the list, and is thus the one
who receives all the mailbounce. The problem is that someone has to
do a LOT of work (this list would require a new digest every 2-4
days).
This arpa list is of the first kind, which gets us messages
faster, but has obvious drawbacks. For one, we now have NO moderator,
as Mark Crispin stopped some while ago, and no one has stepped forward
to take his place. This means that there are no changes being made to
the file containing our names. I have been trying to desubscribe for
a month now, without success. It would be quite possible (and quite
nice) if someone wrote yet a third kind of mailing list program which
would do as you suggested -- automatically send out a message FROM
info-atari-request TO (everyone on the list) each time it received a
message TO info-atari; not unlike an automatic single-message digest.
That way, mailbounc would go to info-atari-request, and the moderator
could handle it there. This is indeed a part of a program called pmd
(personal mail demon) which is written in C and runs on any system
which looks for a .forward file before putting mail in someone's
mailbox (e.g. any system running sendmail). A friend of mine wrote
pmd, and I will send copies to anyone who wants one.
Unfortunately, since we don't have a moderator, this
won't happen for a while, so all of us (including usenet recipients)
will have to suffer a while longer. This brings up your last
suggestion. DON'T START A MAILER WAR! What will happen is this: you
send a message into the net. 3 machines work for a few days trying to
send your message, and send back one refusal message per day (all the
others copies of your message get to us). That's nine messages you
get back. You resend those messages to the "offending machines"
(which are only doing their jobs). Each machine works for three more
days trying to send the messages...you get 27 messages back. Your
phone bill will blow up before the machines will. If you send to
postmaster at those machines and complain, they will tell you not to
expect mail to be delivered to nonexistent addresses, and they HAVE to
return it (arpanet requires it). The source of the problem is not at
what you call the "offending machines", but on our list and the way it
is (isn't) being run. The only solution is to FIND A MODERATOR! I
can't do it, because I don't have the kind of storage capacity
necessary to hold the archives, and frankly, I want to get off this
list.
An arpa-arpa mailer war can bring (and has brought) down the
Arpanet in a disastrous way. An arpa-usenet mailer war will kill the
usenet recipient with phone bills long before the arpa machine dies
from overload. If you bounce your bad mail to the machine the list is
on, most likely it will slow things down there (as well as load up the
list, which you receive) and the people using that machine will
complain and the list will go away.
There are two immediate solutions: 1. suffer (i.e. accept the
mailbounce as the cost of posting.) or 2. don't post. I don't like it
(think: I get 8-15 messages a day that I don't want, whether or not I
post to the list!), but aside from writing to postmaster@score and
telling him to completely kill the list (BAD IDEA!), we're stuck.
--jh--
e-mail: post:
jh@mit-athena.MIT.EDU (preferred) Joe Harrington
jh%oz@mit-mc.MIT.EDU 69 Chestnut Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139sean@ukma.UUCP (Sean Casey) (10/27/85)
In article <12153970199.6.MRC@SIMTEL20.ARPA> MRC@SIMTEL20.ARPA (Mark Crispin) writes: >Attention: > > If any electronic "bombarding" is attempted I will guarantee that >your mailbox will be filled with 100 megabytes of mail. The right >"fix" for the problem is to have somebody maintain INFO-ATARI again. > > I am sorry that UUCP is so primitive. I consider myself fortunate >not to have to use it. I was not suggesting bombardment, just rerouting of mail messages so that they go to the person(s) responsible for all the junk mail. Look at it this way: Due to incorrect management and/or software, many megabytes have already been sent to the wrong people. UUCP may be primitive, but it is the arpa sites that are exhibiting the brain-damaged behavior. Being fortunate is a matter of perspective. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sean Casey UUCP: sean@ukma.UUCP or 915 Patterson Office Tower {cbosgd,anlams,hasmed}!ukma!sean University of Kentucky ARPA: ukma!sean@ANL-MCS.ARPA Lexington, Ky. 40506-0027 BITNET: sean@UKMA.BITNET -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
preece@ccvaxa.UUCP (10/28/85)
> Among other odious behaviour exhibited by these mailers is that they > will try an address for three days, and EACH DAY they will send an > update if the message has not gotten through. Personally, I only want > to know when my message finally fails. Before that, I don't want to > hear it! /* Written 3:21 am Oct 25, 1985 by > fair@ucbarpa.BERKELEY.EDU in ccvaxa:net.micro.atari */ ---------- That's a necessary attitude on Usenet, where mail may take two weeks to arrive at its destination. Perhaps the Arpanet people, with continuous connectivity, are used to mail performance that makes a one day delay onerous. -- scott preece gould/csd - urbana ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!preece