Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Email on fencepost hosed?

[Bob Proulx]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Bob Proulx wrote:
> > mail to the @gnu.org addres should have been working okay (doesn't
> > involve fencepost)

Note that I was specifically talking about address@hidden and not
address@hidden  :-)  Just to avoid a misunderstanding on that part.

> I wasn't (and still am not) sure this was so, at least not for me.  My
> inbox stayed empty during all that time, although by watching list
> archives I saw traffic on mailing lists to which I am subscribed.  So
> clearly something was wrong with incoming mail as well.  Doesn't it go
> through exim that crashed?

If you only receive email to and from your address@hidden through
fencepost then yes for you your email was completely broken both
incoming and outgoing while exim was offline on fencepost.

As I said I had forgotten about people that are plugged into fencepost
like that for email.  So my comments weren't on target for you.  Sorry
but you were in a forgotten category.  I am not trying to make small
of it but I had forgotten about it and therefore didn't encompass it.
Sorry.  I try to remember all of the different possibilties but
sometimes I am completely missing something.  This case was out of
sight and out of mind for me at that moment.  However for anyone else
not plugged into fencepost the comments I made were true and correct
for them.

For that matter you could have emailed address@hidden from anywhere
other than fencepost and gotten through to them and it wouldn't have
gone through fencepost.  That was really the point of my comment.  For
the world that isn't fencepost anyone else could have emailed about it
and it would have gone through okay.

If *I* write address@hidden or address@hidden those will go
through 'eggs' for the first and 'mail' for the second.  (I think
those are both different VMs on the same host though.  So not quite
redundant.  But again if there is a problem with those it is such a
huge deal that any problem would get addressed very quickly.)

I always use this email address as my normal outbound email.  But I
have several others available to me that I could use for emergency
fallback communication.  For me fencepost is a good fallback if my
normal email is offline due to networking or whatever.  (It has always
been networking problems when there have been problems.)  And I have a
few other places I could email from too.  I tend to use those when my
server network is offline.  It seems that everyone I meet has several
addresses available for them to use if needed.  But it is perfectly
okay if you do not!  It just means that you don't have a fallback if
fencepost isn't happy.

It is in those cases that as John suggested IRC to #fsfsys can be a
good fallback.  For quick use I think the web interface is probably
easiest for the casual user.  Here is one possibility.

  https://webchat.freenode.net/

> Also, messages I sent directly from fencepost (from Emacs running
> there) did seem to arrive, at least to one mailing list to which I
> posted.  How did that work, when exim was down?  Do local clients use
> some other MTA?

I don't know.  It is posssible.  It all depends upon how things are
configured.  I normally have my stuff use /usr/sbin/sendmail in which
case mail can be queued even when the daemon is not running.  It will
pick up the messages and deliver them when it starts.

But it is also possible that a mail client on fencepost would be
configured to use SMTP (very common these days) to, say,
"mail.$mydomain" and on fencepost that would again be eggs.gnu.org.
Since eggs was up this would mean that you could have sent mail from
fencepost, have it SMTP transported to eggs, from there to
lists.gnu.org, and on to the mailing lists.

> Thanks for the other explanations.

Keep asking questions until things make sense.

Bob