By way of intro, I have been 'doing' the listowner thing for a couple of
years, and just recently realized I could probably save a lot of time
discovering solutions thru this list. I was right, and am. BTW - My email
addy is my name. Folks usually call me jc or jcl. I mention this now only
because I have certainly met my share of correspondents that believed I was
being something or other. Nuff said.

Problems with AOL is the immediate reason I began reading this list. Bounce
messages from AOL have become a real pain. Full Mailbox errors is by far
the leading cause, but recently I have been getting AOL bounces for message
line length too long. Many of our AOL susbcribers have been reading our
list in Digest, which I have just reduced from 1000 lines to 600 lines to
please AOL. I added an autodelete line last week, reducing limits from the
default of 100 messages or 5 days to 20 bounced messages or 4 days. It has
been working for the very small percentage of non-AOL bounces, but not on
the AOL bounces. I have a hunch that the AOL style of listing several
different email addys it is rejecting in a single message may be the reason
my auto delete is not working. My list, [log in to unmask], is
moderately busy, 150 or so messages a day, and I see no fewer than a
hundred bounces a day from AOL, if I don't quiet delete each addy manually.
I'd love to find a way to let the listserv do it automatically. I have
discovered some other mail lists that simply do not allow certain ISP addys
to subscribe - WebTV is one of them. I would hate to do that to our AOL
subscribers, of which I had counted as more than 150 individuals. Help???
jcl

At 03:36 PM 1/25/99 +0000, Dave Wilson wrote:
>>         I'm getting reports from AOL subscribers that they aren't receiving
>> postings from our lists.  Any idea why?
>
>...you just beat me to it. I've been getting an increasing number of similar
>reports from one of the listowners on my system, mostly about AOL, but some
>others as well. There were messages being silently dropped; I asked the
>listowner to turn off auto-delete, and there was no response. The problem
>tended to persist for some days, then go away again.
>
>While poring over logfiles (listserv.log and sendmail) I finally discovered
>that the mail for these subscribers all seems to go via the LISTSERV backbone.
>For the lists concerned, listserv.heanet.ie never makes a delivery directly to
>AOL. I can't trace its route any further than our nearest peer. Successfully
>delivered posts show a jump in the Received: headers from listserv.heanet.ie
>directly to a host in ease.lsoft.com.
>
>As it happens, I found a couple of bounce messages in Postmaster's mailbox
>this morning, from the weekend. It looks like a LISTSERV job for our
>nearest peer that got refused at the SMTP level. The errors are:
>
>>>> DATA
><<< 500 error reading ine, status = %LSMTP-E-SMTP_READTMO, Timed out reading
>from network
>554 <LISTSERV@insert_peer_name>... Remote protocol error
>
>(my substitution)
>
>I've been sceptical throughout that it would be a problem in the LISTSERV
>backbone since I've always found it to be extremely reliable; however, my
>investigations seem to have reached a dead end. Any clues?
>
>Lsoft: I have more info & msgs about this archived if you need to follow up.
>
>Many thanks,
>Dave
>
>--
>----------------------------------- [log in to unmask]  Dave Wilson,
HEA-NOC
>HEAnet Limited, Marine House, Clanwilliam Court, Dublin 2  ph.  +353-1-662
3412