[OS X TeX] Odd mailing list software behaviour?

[Justin Walker]

On Jun 22, 2004, at 12:53, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> For a few days now, I've been receiving messages (including mine) 
> several hours after they had been posted, and not necessarily in the 
> order in which they had been posted. For example, I received answers 
> to my earlier posts of today before the posts themselves; and 
> similarly for Maarten's latest message, posted at 15:39 today (Paris 
> time) and received here at 20:52.
>
> Do other people experience the same oddities? Or is it because I've a 
> .mac address, in which case the culprits would be the .mac servers?

FWIW, I often see similar behavior, but it's hard to pinpoint.

One problem is that "time" is truly relative.  It's hard to evaluate 
the "out of order delivery" issue without a lot of supporting detail.

If you look at the raw message text, you can get a partial clue by 
checking the "received from" lines to see how the time changes at each 
handoff on the message's trip from there to here.  From your msg:

 From bvoisin at mac.com
    >>>> Tue Jun 22 14:55:22 2004
Received: from mac.com (smtpin04-en2 [10.13.10.149])
    >>>> 22 Jun 2004 14:55:22 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from smail1.ecs.psu.edu (smail1.ecs.psu.edu [130.203.201.20])
    >>>> 22 Jun 2004 14:54:56 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1])
    >>>> 22 Jun 2004 17:55:36 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from smail1.ecs.psu.edu ([127.0.0.1])
    >>>> 22 Jun 2004 17:55:35 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from email.esm.psu.edu (email.esm.psu.edu [130.203.247.204])
    >>>> 22 Jun 2004 17:55:25 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from mac.com by email.esm.psu.edu with SMTP; Tue,
    >>>> 22 Jun 2004 15:53:17 -0400
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 21:53:08 +0200

so your mail apparently took about 2 minutes from 'send' to 'receive'; 
and most of that time was spent in the first queue at psu.edu.

Also, while I've seen horrid delays in my mail, I can't always 
attribute it to the .mac address.  Postings to some lists show up 
quickly; those to others seem to take hours (and the behavior seems 
more closely correlated with the list than the time of occurrence).

Regards,

Justin

--
Justin C. Walker, Curmudgeon-At-Large  *
Institute for General Semantics        | Some people have a mental
                                        |  horizon of radius zero, and
                                        |  call it their point of view.
                                        |     -- David Hilbert
*--------------------------------------*-------------------------------*

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