Re: [Gnuplot-info] delayed emails

[Hans-Bernhard B. <HBB...@t-...>]

On 15.12.2010 12:17, gnu...@t4... wrote:
> Is anyone else receiving messages to this list, much delayed? I just
> received a spate of messages that were several days old.

The problem is that these mailing lists are, like all mail addresses, 
under constant barrage by spammers.  The only way to keep the amount of 
spam that passes through to the subscribers under some level of control 
is to restrict submissions to the list to subscribed members only.  All 
other entries, hopefully including all the spam, get held in a filter.

Unfortunately that means that somebody has to go through those blocked 
entries and decide which of them to pass on into the list, and which to 
throw away.  That somebody is me.  I'm supposed to regularly get a mail 
from SF.net whenever there's something to decide, so I'll log in to the 
administrative interface and handle those pending requests.  So yes, 
there's a lag.

Now for some strange reason I haven't discovered yet, those reminder 
mails seem to have got stuck in some massive delay loop.  Most of the 
reminders from October have arrived only _yesterday_!  I had 
optimistically assumed the flood of entries had subsided a bit.  Turns 
out only the regular reminders got stuck.  So the lag, which is usually 
on the order of one day, got seriously extended for a while.

Faced with the choice between blocking those entries altogether, and 
letting them through even after a rather massive delay, I chose the latter.

> For example, consider message-id<304...@ta...>,
                                                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Those guys are a yet another nuisance.  Nabble misrepresents itself as 
running a mailing list of their own, when they're actually just 
shadowing ours, with their own advertisement added to the bottom.
Since their users aren't subscribed to the actual list, their 
submissions get held as possible spam, so they never reach the real list 
--- only those people subscribing to Nabble's fake.

That doesn't stop other users (I assume you know who you are...) reading 
through Nabble's fake mailing list from replying, though.  If the 
replier is subscribed to the real list, his answers get through 
immediately.  Once I get informed about the question held as possible 
spam, I pass them through, so that's why you sometimes get answers 
considerably earlier than their questions.