>         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