mailloops

[Stephan Uhlmann]

Hi,

Sorry for being offtopic, but I just wanted to say something about the
mailproblems yesterday.

As already many found out, there were two mail adresses on the list whose
mailservers looped the mail back to the list, instead sending an error-message
to the "return-path address". That is a misconfiguration of these mailservers.

But partly it was my fault. The maximum number of mailserver hops allowed was on
default value which is a bit too high for a-bit-larger-than-normal-mailinglists.
I set it down to 14, which I hope is a good value, not locking out desired
mails but trying to supress mailloops at the same time.
If anybody suspects that his/her mails does not get through the list because of
this, just contact me.

In general, if there are any problems like mailloops or something like that,
please mail directly to postmaster at barney.cs.uni-potsdam.de and try to avoid a
big discussion on the list, only causing even more offtopic traffic.

One more thing I want to mention: We get _lots_ of error-mails every day because
of undeliverable mails. This is nothing unusual because servers can have
temporarily technical problems. But it helps if you use an email adress of a
big mailserver which has a good connection/bandwidth and which is actively
administrated (like uni or freemailers). EMail adresses which cause trouble
like "user unknown" / "unknown host" for a long period of time (>weeks) are
silently unsubscribed.

If you have any suggestions or complains just tell me, but please keep in mind
that it's all volunteer by a bunch of people (including me) here at the uni.

Sorry again for the trouble,

Stephan


P.S.: Yesterday we had a new all time high of 28464 delivered mails ;-)

--
Stephan Uhlmann <suhlmann at gmx.de>, ICQ:53637201
Kmud Project: http://www.kmud.de 
!seineew era sreenigne tfosorciM