karl_kleinpaste@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (02/22/90)
I run a few mid-sized mailing lists, that is, population in the ~200 range. There's a number of list recipients for whom mail gets from here to there via a Certain Well-Known Vendor. Every 10 days or 2 weeks or thereabouts, the mailer and/or nameserver configuration at this Vendor goes all to hell, and I start getting large numbers of bounces aimed back at myself (as the "-request" address). Now, usually, when I get this sort of thing, and it's clear that it's a local problem at the intermediate site, I just forward such stuff to postmaster@that.site. But this one Vendor postmaster's inability to maintain a functioning mailer on a consistent basis is really beginning to irritate me. This has been going on for quite some months now. This Vendor is also the MX host for a Well-Known Network Services Company, connected to the Vendor via UUCP. If I were the Net Svc Company, I'd be pretty @#$% irritated that my customers' mail was so frequently trashed, but it's possible (if unlikely) that the Net Svc Company isn't even aware of the problem. Any suggestions on how to deal with this sort of situation? My forwardings to postmaster@Ven.dor have gotten alternately flammable and sarcastic, but nothing has helped so far. I could publicize names, I suppose, but I'd really rather not do that; I just want the mail to move more consistently. No vendettas are on my mind. --karl
woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) (03/01/90)
In article <KARL.90Feb22095055@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu> karl_kleinpaste@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu writes: >My >forwardings to postmaster@Ven.dor have gotten alternately flammable >and sarcastic, but nothing has helped so far. As a fellow postmaster, the one thing I can 100% GUARANTEE is that this will be ineffective. Anyone who abuses me from outside my organization has all their mail sent to /dev/null (note that I am capable of seeing the difference between abuse and constructive criticism; the latter is always welcomed, because occasionally some of those suggestions are good ones!). I wasn't quite clear on the exact situation you are talking about. If the site you are trying to reach via the ven.dor in question is really paying ven.dor to provide this service, that's one thing; otherwise ven.dor has NO OBLIGATION to forward your mail. If the service is that bad, then I'd recommend that the people you are trying to get to find another place to connect to. I've had some of my downstream UUCP mail sites bitch about some of our policies; my answer is that if they don't like the service we provide to them FOR FREE, AT ZERO BENEFIT TO US, they are free to subscribe to UUNET and PAY for service they will be entitled to bitch about, or else find another sucker, er, connection with policies more to their liking. Good luck. Now, as to whether ven.dor should make an attempt to provide these services as a PR measure, that's another issue. My point is that, unless this is a paid-for service, they are under no OBLIGATION to do so nor to respond to abuse from outsiders. --Greg
karl@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) (03/01/90)
woods@ncar.ucar.edu writes:
As a fellow postmaster, the one thing I can 100% GUARANTEE is that
[flames/sarcasm] will be ineffective. Anyone who abuses me from outside my
organization has all their mail sent to /dev/null...
Greg, please, chill out just a bit. When things at this site first
started getting screwy some months back, I quite properly (and gently)
pointed out the bounces I was getting, and asked that things be fixed
so that things wouldn't bounce that way.
When it became clear that my forwarded bounces were at best getting
temporary fixes and nothing was done In The Large, I started getting a
bit uptight about it. It broke again just yesterday. I only got one
bounce for it, but I forwarded it to the relevant postmaster with the
one-word comment, "Bozos." I think it's appropriate. That can be
interpreted abusively, of course, but that's just the way it is. I've
gotten a LOT of bounces.
As for obligation to forward mail, most of the mailing list recipients
for which I have trouble are employees of the vendor in question. I
tend to think they'd have a somewhat more serious interest in their
own people getting their own mail.
Perhaps not, however. When things have been badly enough broken, I've
found that I can't even get mail to administrative addresses. For
example, last Thursday, I forwarded one of these bounces to
postmaster@ven.dor, only to have that bounce back at me also. So I
tried the shotgun approach (domains changed to protect the guilty):
To: postmaster@ven.dor, uucp@ven.dor, usenet@ven.dor, news@ven.dor,
root@ven.dor, daemon@ven.dor, mailer-daemon@ven.dor,
sys@ven.dor, adm@ven.dor, admin@ven.dor,
lord-only-knows-who-else-i-will-fail-to-find@ven.dor
I got a bounce for every single one.
--karlwoods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) (03/01/90)
In article <KARL.90Feb28170326@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu> karl@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) writes: >woods@ncar.ucar.edu writes: > As a fellow postmaster, the one thing I can 100% GUARANTEE is that > [flames/sarcasm] will be ineffective > >Greg, please, chill out just a bit. There is no need for me to "chill out" since I am not upset. I am merely using myself as an example to point out that flames and sarcasm will not be met with a positive response no matter how many previous friendly messages have been sent. >As for obligation to forward mail, most of the mailing list recipients >for which I have trouble are employees of the vendor in question. Sorry. That was not the impression I got from your original posting. >I tend to think they'd have a somewhat more serious interest in their >own people getting their own mail. Yes, so would I. In that case I would suspect that the answer is that this vendor does not have anyone competent to maintain an Internet mailer for a large site properly. As one who is paid to do that for a living, I can testify as to how difficult this is to do. Even my mailer haas some known problems. The trouble is, to fix those tends to break something else that is more important to our users. Not only this, but such people are very hard to find, as my current bosses can testify. They knew I could do this job, because I was already doing it unofficially, but I worked for another division at the time, and for obvious reasons they do not like to lure employees away from other divisions. They tried for several months to find someone from outside and were unable to do so. Qualified postmasters are rare and expensive. Now, you could possibly blast the vendor in question for not doing what is necessary to get such a person, but if the problem is that they don't have one, then calling the postmaster a bozo is not likely to motivate him/her to try and help you. --Greg