Mailing List flyrotary@lancaironline.net Message #29083
From: Ernest Christley <echristley@nc.rr.com>
Subject: Re: [FlyRotary] Re: The Ire of Ma Bell
Date: Sun, 08 Jan 2006 22:03:32 -0500
To: Rotary motors in aircraft <flyrotary@lancaironline.net>
Chad Robinson wrote:

Russell Duffy wrote:

The path of least resistance might be to try the gmail account for the flyrotary list, which is the ONLY thing I have a problem with.  Otherwise, Bellsouth has been just outstanding.  Fast, reliable, etc, except when dealing with the lancaironline server.   I just wish I knew enough about how this all worked to figure out where the problem really is.


Rusty, I guarantee that even if you knew what you were doing there'd be no way you could resolve this problem yourself, unless the problem is on your PC. SMTP is a very simple and very old protocol that contains no delivery guarantees, security mechanisms, or other features we expect from software today. All it does is send a message from one server to another. The message may go directly to the recipient's (or mailing list's) e-mail server, or it may bounce through six servers on its way there. Either way, the sender and recipient are not part of the actual transaction, so you aren't provided with the debugging information you'd need to analyze the problem.


That's technically correct, but the headers will give you enough information for you to start naming names.  For instance, I pull then this from the header of message #29000 in the archives:

Received: from imf01aec.mail.bellsouth.net ([205.152.59.49] verified)
 by logan.com (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 5.0.6)
 with ESMTP id 915499 for flyrotary@lancaironline.net; Fri, 06 Jan 2006 12:46:26 -0500
Received-SPF: pass
receiver=logan.com; client-ip=205.152.59.49; envelope-from=13brv3@bellsouth.net
Received: from ibm59aec.bellsouth.net ([65.6.194.9])
         by imf19aec.mail.bellsouth.net with ESMTP
         id <20060105000213.GWBH3308.imf19aec.mail.bellsouth.net@ibm59aec.bellsouth.net>
         for <flyrotary@lancaironline.net>; Wed, 4 Jan 2006 19:02:13 -0500


From this, we know that lancaironline recieved the message on 6 Jan.  The hop before that was imf01aec.mail.bellsouth.net, and it recieved the message on the 4th. I just pinged that mail server and it has the same IP and a latency of only 45ms or so, so we know the server is up and not overloaded right now, but we don't know what the history of it is.

I looked at the header of a message from Rusty that did not have the delay.  Message #29024 got to lancaironline from

imf17aec.mail.bellsouth.net There was only 48sec between the time imf17aec recieved it and lancaironline recieved it.

If you can call BS tech support with actual machine names and IP address of problem machines, you'll probably be able to get some action.

--
This is by far the hardest lesson about freedom. It goes against
instinct, and morality, to just sit back and watch people make
mistakes. We want to help them, which means control them and their
decisions, but in doing so we actually hurt them (and ourselves)."

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