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[RC] OT: Multiple Postings - John Teeteri'm pretty sure the duplicates were related to the aol block. basically my server is configured to attempt redelivery 5 times when presented with delivery errors of certain classes. Messages are "batched" together in the queue, generally with 1 target domain, but sometimes it has multiples target domains. When AOL turned the block on this afternoon, my outgoing mail queue when from @30-60 retry batches to over 6000 in a period of 30 minutes or so. I think my retry time (set at 30 min) got blown away by the volume of retrys (i.e. there were multiple retry threads running through the spool at one time. I think the sw I'm using may have a problem keeping targets straight when that happens - i.e. if you email address was in with one of the aol batches that was being retried; you would possibly get a duplicate. my queue manager is supposed to know which of the members of a batch didn't make it ... but it to be able to forget, so you got a duplicate every time it re-tried sending to the aol guys.sorry about the inconvenience. It's important on the net that everyone deals with the protocols appropriately. the error code returned by AOL (421 service unavailable) is normally used for "throttling" the email environment. It means, try again later as I can't handle your request right now. (there are others which are also miss-used: yahoo does a lot of 550 mailbox not found for perfectly good email addresses - but that's a "hard" error which results in an immediate bounce - when you see "gaps" in your message stream, that's generally the reason. Yahoo couldn't (generally because of network or server responses times) find a way to immediately deliver your email. AOL's use of 421 is particularly irksome - what is REALLY means is someone hit the spam button on their email client and this service (AOL email delivery) is unavailable to you for 24 hours. which means, for 24 hours, email will bounce. If I were to set my re-try time to 24 hours (and buy a suitably large amount of extra disc space to hold the spool), then it would clear and you'd start getting the blocked messages a day later. anyway, too much tech, but the bottom line. I'd appreciate it if you AOL guys would find a more networthy email provider. I apologize for the duplicates. The spool currently has @220 items in it and falling reasonably fast as they decay away. My Postmaster file is 46meg currently - I'll just throw it away - it's all AOL bounces (oh, did I tell you, their bounce messages average @4k or so in size. I was a little worried this afternoon about being able to get the attention of my server to stop the flood...) I guess what this REALLY means is that I sent to many WEC updates today and someone in AOL land got frustrated and hit the spam button! Remember - endurance.net is an "opt-in" kind of service. you got to request to be there - you can also turn off/on the stream. there is a link at the bottom of every email posting which takes you right to the subscribe/unsubscribe place.... ride well -- your endurance.net postmaster:) jt (p.s. any of you techies out there see a clean way around this let me know - I'm open for suggestions. The most obvious is to gateway through an non-blocked IP - but such an un-necessary pain...:)
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