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From: Magnus Hagander <[email protected]>
To: Andrew Sullivan <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: what is up with the PG mailing lists?
Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:30:13 +0100
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
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Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 08:09:59AM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>> However the "mailing list" problem is a constant. Sometimes they work,
>> sometimes I don't get messages for hours. This is not the first time I
>> or others have brought up the mailing list issues.
> 
> There are indeed sometimes mailing list latency issues.  But I
> caution everyone in being too glib about some of this:
> 
> 1.	All the mail RFCs are totally clear that latency is to be
> expected in the mail system.  Every time I hear complaints about mail
> latency that entails delays of merely hours, I worry that people are
> treating SMTP as though it's XMPP.  It ain't, and it's designed _not_
> to be.

There's a difference between acceptable delay and what we're often
getting. Sure, SMTP should have latency. But a modern SMTP system
shouldn't take hours to deliver an email.


> 2.	There are plenty of individual relays involved here, and
> saying "it's slow" without mail headers is no more helpful in
> demystifying mail issues than are posts to -performance without
> EXPLAIN ANALYSE output.

Sure. But I can tell you that *every single time* I've looked at
latencies, the problem has been at postgresql.org or hub.org. And in my
own case, there is just one relay on the way, usually with a latency of
<5 seconds.


> 3.	We know that sometimes, moderation _does_ cost.  This is
> especially true because we've already cranked up a lot of rules to
> capture common abuses (spam, common admin keywords) that are far from
> free to run on lists with the volume of mail the postgres lists get. 
> So we're really paying for two moderations: humans, and machines.

That's very true.


>> It would be great if the actual sysadmin team had management ability on
>> the mail servers. 
> 
> This seems true to me.  More important,
> 
>> Note we still don't have documentation on this stuff
> 
> I think this is a very serious problem.  Some of the issues have been
> perplexing to diagnose because of the poor documentation.  We talked
> about this most recently with respect to MX records and
> higher-preference-number MXes having the user list from the final
> destination, so that we could generate rejects consistently, IIRC.

Can't agree more.

//Magnus

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