[EMAIL PROTECTED] mused: > > > > > > From: "John Francis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > > > Unfortunately my earlier post about missing eMail rather undermines > > this theory. I receive my pdml posts at an ISP where I can be 100% > > certain that no such filtering takes place. Despite that, though, > > I don't get 100% of the pdml posts. > > Yet (and I'm not being argumentative here, just underlining the paradoxial > nature of what's going on) my ISP seems to be using extremely aggressive > filters. I get _no_ spam whatsoever. I also seem to be receiving all PDML > posts. Can't be 100% sure, of course, without some extensive observing which > I'm not prepared to do at the moment but I can't remember an instance (for > example) of not getting a threadstarter post. Sometimes they are out of > synch; Rob Studdert's posts are inevitably so. Posts later in threads are > more difficult to spot [especially if they are missing 8-)] but I can't > remember an example of seeing a post quoted that I had not already seen or > saw shortly thereafter. > > Lucky me.
As you say - lucky you. This just confirms another thing I said - pdml messages don't fit the profile of the sort of messages that get intercepted by those automated spam filters. I see the same "out of order" messages, but that's usually a byproduct of the mail display program; I'd bet that yours, like mine, defaults to sorting by the time the message was sent. That doesn't always work too well in a multi-time-zone environment; the mail timestamp is in the local time of the sender. Rob Studdert's clock is several hours ahead of ours, so his messages get sorted into later positions. That's another reason to switch to using a threaded mail reader, but I'm still not doing that by default for my first look at pdml messages. But, to get back to the main topic: I don't lose many messages. When everybody was complaining recently about large numbers of lost messages I think I only identified three or four messages that I had missed. And most of the time everything works just fine; most messages get through to most recipients with absolutely no problems. My suspicions are centred on what the list server does if an attempt to deliver a message fails (which can happen in multiple ways, from failing to get a DNS hostname lookup for the mail host, through not being able to establish a socket connection, having the mail server say it is too busy, etc., etc. to simply not getting the closing handshake saying the mail has been accepted). Presumably it will retry the delivery a few times before giving up completely. But I think there may be one or more ways through that code that result in a message getting dropped.
