Re: [Nmh-workers] Stanford disliking my emails -- update + question

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        24 Apr 2015 10:33:27 -0600
    From:        "Andy Bradford" <address@hidden>
    Message-ID:  <address@hidden>

  | Gmail will  not allow you to  receive both the message  from the mailing
  | list *AND* the  mailing list sent directly to you.

Unless gmail is doing that is some bizarre way, the issue is that my
message direct to Bob didn't arrive at gmail until well after the mailing
list copy was delivered to everyone else.

If gmail is predicting that Bob was going to receive a copy because of the
address in the To/Cc headers, then it is wildly broken - by the time SMTP
gets involved, those are no more than comments (as Ken said in an earlier
message, I have unusual levels of control over my mail system - it is not
without precedent for me to delete delivery to one recipient before the
message leaves my MTA - but they will still be listed in the header fields).

I would also note that it is possible it is the mailing list exploder on
nongnu,org that's doing it - detecting a To/Cc header with an address that's
also on the list, and dropping that address from the list expansion.  That
would be (just slightly) less broken than having the receiving MTA drop
a message because it assumes a later one will arrive, and I'd actuually
give a higher probability than the "gmail hid it" hypothesis.

Incidentally, the reason for the delay is most likely a local problem here,
mail to gmail would normally be transferred over an IPv6 connection, but
someone local has installed some broken firewall (or something) that is
affecting SMTP over IPv6 in weird ways - connection attempts start to work,
late enough that sendmail doesn't fall back to other addresses, but without
allowing messages through.  The copy that was delivered eventually went via
IPv4, so v6 must have been (for whatever reason) even more down at that
instant, preventing even the SNY/SYN-ACK from succeeding, and allowing
fall back to gmail's v4 addresses.   In any case, this isn't something to
blame on Stanford's, or gmail's, spam filtering...   This issue is known
here, and being worked upon, it just isn't fixed yet...

And while I'm commenting on "issues" the "Error: Malformed IPv6 address" from
the Received header from eggs.gnu.org might be because of the (quite) recent
decision that abbreviated IPv6 addresses shouldn't be used (no ::s), munnari
has had no updates for a while (and that is not important enough to warrant
one) so it still uses 2001:3c8:9009:181::2 when it reports its v6 addr, instead
of 2001:3c8:9009:181:0:0:0:2 - I'm not certain that's the cause of the
warning, but it is all I can think of (it must be in an ascii form of the
address, the binary form cannot have a "bad octet value")

  | Didn't  you say  you received  a  copy that  was sent  directly to  you?
  | Perhaps  I've missed  something... is  the concern  that you  received 0
  | copies of the message in question, or that you received just 1 copy (the
  | one sent directly to you)?

His concern was the delay - he'd seen replies to a message that he didn't
receive for days (and if I'd noticed the holdup, and dropped that copy of
the message - expecting him to receive, or have already received, a copy
via the list - might never have seen).

kre