Re: what is up with the PG mailing lists?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

A
-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca