[AT] quiet??

[Jim Becker]

Another symptom I see once in a while is a long delay before delivery.  This 
can result in getting a reply to a message long before the original arrives.

I assume this also has to do with overloading.

Jim Becker

-----Original Message----- 
From: Spencer Yost
Sent: Saturday, December 21, 2019 11:14 AM
To: Antique Tractor Email Discussion Group
Subject: Re: [AT] quiet??


I address this subject from time to time.   Missing emails can be any number 
of issues. A very common reason is rate limiting. When a mail server for an 
ISP starts to become overloaded it will delete messages marked as “ bulk“; 
which mailing list mail is.   Because it’s overloaded, it does not report 
this back to the sender(it’s already overloaded, why send?).   So it just 
silently dumps it.  So there is never a way to know this for sure from my 
side.

Whitelists set up for your account will often cure this but not always.

ISPs also look at the original sender (not the mailing list but the author) 
and if that sender’s ISP is in a black hole list it will reject it.   I used 
to get this reply back when I managed the lists on my own server but now 
that I use a cloud provider I don’t.

This usually gets sorted out within a few days because ending up in a black 
hole list creates noticeable issues for that ISP and they are usually 
motivated to solve it.

Also, mailings lists don’t retry delivery very frequently before giving up. 
If there is a temporary issue in delivering to you(eg your ISP’s mail server 
is experiencing issues or your mailbox is full) the message may never come 
if the issues isn’t rectified within the retry window.   The first 
reason(rate limiting) and this reason often go hand in hand.   After an 
outage a mail server is usually swamped.

And lastly, SPAM processing is notoriously inconsistent.   Sometimes it will 
end up in your SPAM folder but that is never guaranteed.   They may have 
just deep-sixed it with no party ever being notified.   An infuriating 
aspect of this is it often will affect messages from certain senders more 
than others.   This is usually the reason if you find you most often miss 
messages from a particular sender.

In closing I do know and feel the pain.   After moving to a cloud provider 
even I miss the occasional message.   Most I find in the SPAM folder but 
every once in a blue moon it’s just “gone”.

Spencer
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