OldTools Archive

Recent Bios FAQ

264155 Andrew Heybey <ath@h...> 2017‑12‑08 Re: Yew carving and weird email
> On Dec 7, 2017, at 6:12 PM, scott grandstaff  wrote:
> 
> And weird email problems.
>  Did you ever get a "stuck" piece of email? I had an ordinary auction listing
notice from ebay, that got stuck on my incoming mail server. It would resend
every few minutes and nothing else!?!?? I woke up to 377 copies of the thing.
>  Meanwhile any new email that came was sitting my snowcrest's server, and
wouldn't download to my computer.
>   When I finally found the "bad" piece of email on the server, and deleted it,
mail service returned to normal.... just like that.
>   But why did it happen?  Anybody?

Mail servers try very hard not to lose mail.  When sending it onward, the
sending mail server will not delete it until the receiver has said “yep, I got
it”.  If there was something about that problem email that made the receiving
mail process throw an error *after* it had received it but *before* it told the
sender that it had received it, you can get behavior like this.  The mail server
will try again after so often (in your case 377 times) and each time the same
thing happens.  And since that mail was first in the queue, all the other mail
piled up behind it.

andrew

Recent Bios FAQ