Re: OP mail delayed?

Re: OP mail delayed?

[Jason Rumney]

On Jun 6, 4:36 pm, "Drew Adams" <drew.ad...@oracle.com> wrote:
> I seem to be getting the OP of a thread a day or two after the follow-ups.
> Anyone else seeing that?

If you are receiving the list by mail, it is probably the spam filter
at your end delaying mail by unknown senders. I always get bounces
when following up to your messages (usually they are Cc'ed to the
list, so they probably get through to you that way), I think
oracle.com's spam filter is overly paranoid.

RE: OP mail delayed?

[Drew Adams]

> > I seem to be getting the OP of a thread a day or two after 
> > the follow-ups. Anyone else seeing that?
> 
> If you are receiving the list by mail, it is probably the spam filter
> at your end delaying mail by unknown senders. I always get bounces
> when following up to your messages (usually they are Cc'ed to the
> list, so they probably get through to you that way), I think
> oracle.com's spam filter is overly paranoid.

Hm. Maybe. But:

. Others are seeing the same thing.
. This just started happening - it didn't happen before.
. I don't see this in other GNU Emacs mailing lists.

What is the difference between a message with RE coming from the list and a
message without RE? Wouldn't they both be treated the same by a spam filter? Why
would the latter (the OP) be delayed more than the former?

This is not about messages sent directly to me from someone. It is about
messages that come from this list.

Re: OP mail delayed?

[Bob Proulx]

I am not a subscriber of help-gnu-emacs.  Please CC me on replies.  I
am one of the listhelpers that tries to keep spam off of the mailing
lists and do other list maintenance.  I happened to see this
discussion about delayed email delivery and wanted to say a few words
about it.

Drew Adams wrote:
> . Others are seeing the same thing.

There are several reasons this might occur.  One is when there are
several discussion groups for help-gnu-emacs.  I don't know about
help-gnu-emacs in particular but some mailing lists are gatewayed
between an email mailing list and a usenet news group.  Personally I
think that is a bad idea because the mailing list and the newsgroup
have a different set of posting rules.  But in that case an OP who is
not subscribed nor whitelisted may post a message to the newsgroup.
Another person who is subscribed or whitelisted in the mailing list
might see a newsgroup posting from a new address and respond to it on
the newsgroup.  Then both messages are gatewayed to the mailing list.
Because the responder is known to the mailing list it is passed
through without delay.  Because the OP is unknown to the mailing list
the message must be approved by a human until the address proves
itself not to be a spammer and becomes known.

One of the problems of gateways are that a spammer posts spam to the
newsgroup and everyone on the news group will see it.  People then
sometimes respond to the spam.  When the messages are gatewayed to the
mailing list the spam filtering will discard the original spam
message.  Mailing list readers won't see the spam.  But responses to
the spam message by whitelisted posters are not discarded and
therefore readers of the mailing list will see spam coming from the
newsgroup by way of newsgroup responses but will never have seen the
original spam.  Because of the newsgroup response it can pull spam
through from the newsgroup onto the mailing list.  If spam is
cancelled from the newsgroup later this can't cancel the spam message
already delivered to the mailing list.

> . This just started happening - it didn't happen before.

If this really just started happening then this probably isn't a
mailing list to news gateway issue.  Unless a new newsgroup has popped
up recently most of these have been pretty stable for a long time
(years) and you would have been seeing this all along.  Therefore
recent behavior changes would probably indicate something on the
client end of the email delivery.

> . I don't see this in other GNU Emacs mailing lists.

All of the lists.gnu.org mailing lists are handled similarly.
Therefore once again this points to something on the client delivery
end.

> What is the difference between a message with RE coming from the list and a
> message without RE? Wouldn't they both be treated the same by a spam
> filter? Why would the latter (the OP) be delayed more than the
> former?

Messages from addresses unknown to the system, not subscribed and not
whitelisted, are held for approval until one of the human listhelpers
can review the message and send it on its way.  The address is added
to the subscription whitelist and subsequent messages are passed
through without delay.  This step is needed because spammers are now
routinely attacking lists.gnu.org by subscribing and then posting spam
from subscribed addresses.

On your client system if greylisting is implemented (possibly
incorrectly) then your client system will reject temporarily based
upon configured parameters of host system and email addresses in the
sender and recipient fields.  Normally the mailing list would generate
enough continuous traffic that the lists.gnu.org host machine would be
in the known okay host list all of the time and mail from it would
never be delayed.  But it is possible that an overly agressive program
may be written that looks at the original sender and delay mail based
upon the sender address and not the sending host.  This would delay OP
mail from new addresses from the mailing list but would send directly
through response mail from frequent responders.  This would cause
exactly the situation that you describe.

I use greylisting myself and the well known greylisting daemons behave
reasonably by default in this regard and should not create this
problem.  But I think an incorrectly constructed process could easily
create this problem.  If your email delivery has recently gotten more
agressive at spam filtering then something along these lines may be
occurring.

And of course the problem you are seeing might be for any one of a
number of other reasons too.

> This is not about messages sent directly to me from someone. It is about
> messages that come from this list.

If you contact me off-list with message-ids of messages that fall into
this catagory I can chase down more details.

Bob

RE: OP mail delayed?

[Drew Adams]

Thanks for an informative reply, Bob.

I would say that in the last few days the problem has gone away. So maybe the
problem was related to specific posters (e.g. via newsgroups) or some of the
other things you mentioned.

If I notice it again, I'll let you know off list. Thx.

Re: OP mail delayed?

[Jason Rumney]

On Jun 9, 10:56 pm, "Drew Adams" <drew.ad...@oracle.com> wrote:

> Hm. Maybe. But:
>
> . Others are seeing the same thing.
> . This just started happening - it didn't happen before.

I've been getting bounces from your address for about 2 months, but
its still possible that oracle's spam filter was updated recently. The
bounces I'm getting are based on an overly strict application of SPF
records (treating soft failure as hard failure). I suspect these
delays are due to graylisting (delaying mail by unknown senders in the
hope that spamming software will not have proper error handling, and
won't retry later).


> . I don't see this in other GNU Emacs mailing lists.

Perhaps the contributors on those lists are more regular than on this
one.

> What is the difference between a message with RE coming from the list and a
> message without RE? Wouldn't they both be treated the same by a spam filter? Why
> would the latter (the OP) be delayed more than the former?

Maybe the OP is more likely to be a new poster (or at least one the
spam filters haven't seen for a long time), and the replies are more
likely to come from regular contributors who manage to stay in the
spam filter's whitelist. Obviously the delays aren't happening for
everyone, or there would be no replies, so it isn't the GNU servers
that are delaying things.

RE: OP mail delayed?

[Drew Adams]

> > Hm. Maybe. But:
> > . Others are seeing the same thing.

[snipped reply about Oracle's mail filter probably being the cause]

Others with very different mail addresses have reported the same thing. Here's
one from yesterday - this was just mentioned matter of factly at the end of a
mail about a differnt subject:

> (This is based on the quote, I haven't received the original 
> mail yet.)

That was from someone at web.de, not oracle.com. Look around, and you will
notice that there are others who are reporting the same thing.

I doubt it happens with every OP, but it happens with lots of them. And, as you
are an example, apparently not everyone is seeing the problem.

No big deal. Just thought I'd report a problem in case it helps.

OP mail delayed?

[Drew Adams]

I seem to be getting the OP of a thread a day or two after the follow-ups.
Anyone else seeing that?

RE: OP mail delayed?

[Drew Adams]

> I seem to be getting the OP of a thread a day or two after 
> the follow-ups. Anyone else seeing that?

Well, not all OPs. I received this from the list only an hour after I sent it.

But some OPs seem to be delayed quite a bit.

Re: OP mail delayed?

[Juanma Barranquero]

> I seem to be getting the OP of a thread a day or two after the follow-ups.
> Anyone else seeing that?

Yes.

  Juanma

RE: OP mail delayed?

[Drew Adams]

> I seem to be getting the OP of a thread a day or two after 
> the follow-ups. Anyone else seeing that?

Others are apparently also seeing this. Anyone know how this can be fixed?

Re: OP mail delayed?

[Sébastien Vauban]

Hi,

>> I seem to be getting the OP of a thread a day or two after 
>> the follow-ups. Anyone else seeing that?
>
> Well, not all OPs. I received this from the list only an hour after I sent it.
>
> But some OPs seem to be delayed quite a bit.

Would that explain the fact that the threading in Gnus is often
wrong, as you can precisely see in this case?

    ,----
    | Q                    1970-01-01 01:00  0.0k     Re: OP mail delayed?
    | R.+ Drew Adams       2008-06-06 18:27  2.0k           \-> ...
    | R.  Juanma Barranqu  2008-06-06 19:01  2.6k           \-> ...
    | R.+ Drew Adams       2008-06-06 17:36  1.7k             \-> ...
    `----

The root article is "blank", and to be found at the fourth
line... giving a totally inaccurate rendering of the
conversation...

FYI, my sorting config is the following:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
;; --[ Sorting the Summary Buffer

;; sort threads in descending article order
(setq gnus-thread-sort-functions
      '(gnus-thread-sort-by-number))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Best regards,
  Seb

-- 
Sébastien Vauban