[Savannah-hackers-public] Mailman "upgrade" (was Re: Mailman upgrade)

[psmith]

Hi all;

I'm sorry to say that, unless there's currently some problem with the
mailing list servers that will be cleared up shortly, I think we have to
UNDO whatever spam filtering, etc. we currently have installed on
lists.gnu.org etc.

Why?  Because apparently the hardware we have installed is totally
incapable of delivering mail in anything close to an acceptable
timeframe with this filtering enabled.


My mailing lists have slowed virtually to a standstill.  I sent a
critical email to my own mailing list (address@hidden) yesterday
morning at ~10am, and here it is after 9am the next day, almost 24 hours
later, and there is absolutely no sign of that mail anywhere.

I'm just now seeing email that was sent on Monday show up in the Mailman
moderator web site to be approved: I have no idea how long it will take
for the mail to get sent out once it's approved (I approved some last
night which I still haven't seen arrive).

Since I haven't received any email from the list recently I can't give
you any headers, but here are some from the moderated email I approved
this morning:

  Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43)
      id 1FEeaU-0005Rx-8f
      for address@hidden; Wed, 01 Mar 2006 22:34:46 -0500
  Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43)
      id 1FEeaS-0005Qy-2W
      for address@hidden; Wed, 01 Mar 2006 22:34:45 -0500
  Received: from [199.232.76.173] (helo=monty-python.gnu.org)
      by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43)
      id 1FEAkw-0007Lo-1W
      for address@hidden; Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:43:34 -0500
  Received: from [209.196.123.143] (helo=covert.brown-ring.iadfw.net)
      by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.52)
      id 1FDtkD-0005ui-TE
      for address@hidden; Mon, 27 Feb 2006 20:33:42 -0500
  Received: from cpe-24-28-121-130.houston.res.rr.com ([24.28.121.130] 
helo=pcdebian)
      by covert.iadfw.net with esmtp (Exim 4.24)
      id 1FDtnr-0004bh-Pq
      for address@hidden; Mon, 27 Feb 2006 19:37:27 -0600

Here we see monty-python.gnu.org gets the message on Monday at 20:33.
Then there's an inexplicable delay of 18 hours before it's forwarded
from there to lists.gnu.org.

Then, it sits on lists.gnu.org for 32 hours before it's re-injected after
the "spam-scanned" step, and finally it presumably is posted to the web
site for moderator approval last night at 10:30pm, more than 48 hours
after it was sent.


Sorry, but I'd rather have spam than 48 hour delays for mailing list
posts to appear.  Unless there is something currently pathological about
our setup that will be fixed shortly, this is a classic case of the cure
being worse than the disease :-/.

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Paul D. Smith <address@hidden>          Find some GNU make tips at:
 http://www.gnu.org                      http://make.paulandlesley.org
 "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist