Month: August 1997

Fri Aug 15 06:24:37 PDT 1997 — AOL still hasn’t fixed their mail problem. We’ve isolated the problem to high-volume mailing lists, specifically: ‘sammyhagar’, ‘rent,’ and ‘vanhalen’. Sendmail has a terrible problem with delivery to high-volume mailing lists. This is a flaw in its design. Fortunately, we have alternatives to effect mail delivery. The most popular solution is ‘qmail,’ and it is very fast. We are now running qmail on our outbound mail server, which handles mail destined for sites out on the Internet. Apparently, once we implented qmail, the extreme volume and efficency of these mailing lists triggered AOL’s spam filters. This wasn’t obvious at first. To prevent mail bounces, we held all mail to AOL. Now that we know what their problem is, we are delivering all mail to AOL except the high-volume mailing lists mentioned above. Specifically, we’ve implemented a solution that defers mail _from_ these lists, _to_ AOL, while still performing normal delivery.

In other words, mail to AOL is now working, except for the high-volume lists. Please visit news:sonic.net for further discussion of the AOL problem. -Scott

Fri Aug 15 14:11:59 PDT 1997 — AOL has resolved the issue that prevented our lists from delivering mail to them, and mail is currently dequeueing to them like crazy. Our new delivery system has nearly all of the mail sent already, and the performance is impressive! -Eli

Thu Aug 14 14:24:55 PDT 1997 — Because of high mail volumes, AOL’s filters have decided that mail from us is probably spam, and they are bouncing a lot of mail traffic. AOL’s network operations has said that they expect to have this fixed within 24 hours, and until then we are holding all mail which is destined for AOL. We’ll keep you posted here in the MOTD. -Dane

Sun Aug 10 04:20:06 PDT 1997 — During our Sunday morning wee-hour maintenance period, we upgraded our Cisco 7010’s route processor. The Cisco 7010 serves as our gateway to the UUNet and MCI Internet backbones. Downtime was approximately 15 minutes. There’s a picture of the route processor at: www.sonic.net/expansion/fiber/page9.shtml (the route processor is the card in the topmost slot.)

Tue Aug 5 08:59:58 PDT 1997 — Access to Usenet news was unavailable between 6:00am and 6:30am this morning. In other news news, we’ve added three new news feeds in the past couple weeks, and this should give us faster article propagation to our server.

Mon Aug 4 16:46:36 PDT 1997 — We’ve added a site search tool to our web server. This allows you and the people who visit your page to search for data on our entire web site. We’ll be publishing information shortly on how you can incorporate the search tool in your own HTML and limit searches to your area of the server. We’ll be providing more tutorial information in the FAQ section shortly. See it in action at:

www.sonic.net/search/