Question to Moderator

[Alex Rudd]

On Tue, 4 Apr 2006 14:22:18 EDT I said:
>My point here is this:
>
> - You first posted your message about the latest issue of KINOKULTURA
>at 8:03 AM on April 1, 2006.
>
> - LISTSERV informed you that it would not distribute a duplicate of
>that message (as I mentioned above) at 5:11 PM on April 2, 2006.
>
>>From this we can conclude that one of two things happened.  Either you
>submitted your message a second time (33 hours after the first one was
>distributed) or else your message inexplicably remained in the CUNY
>mail server for more than a day and was delivered a second time by the
>mail server to the list server, at which point the list server sent you
>that message.
>
>Can I state definitively for you what happened here?  No... because I
>don't have access to the CUNY server logs and I don't feel like
>bothering the LISTSERV maintainer with this.  <SNIP>

Dear SEELANGers,

I am following up here to my own message (quoted in pertinent part
above).  You will recall that I wrote that message in reply to one
posted by Vladimir Padunov, whom LISTSERV sent a duplicate message
notice more than one day after he posted to the list.  My reply
implied (not so transparently) that I suspected human error was the
culprit, in part because Mr. Padunov's experience was, as far as I
knew, unique, despite the fact that there were 11 messages posted
to SEELANGS on Saturday, April 1, the day on which he posted that
first message.

However... after my reply was distributed, I heard off-list from
another list member who reported similar LISTSERV behavior.  He
posted on Saturday, the post was successful, and yet he immediately
received a notice from LISTSERV advising that his duplicate
submission had been rejected.

Armed with such additional information, I did feel comfortable
bothering the LISTSERV maintainer (who is usually busy dealing
with the 4,000 e-mails he receives every day and no, that is not
an exaggeration).  The LISTSERV maintainer informed me that we
did, in fact, have some trouble on Saturday.  The server crashed
about 50 times, each time bringing itself back up.  Although no
one else from any of the 160+ other lists run on the LISTSERV
server at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU reported this problem to him, he
conceded that my other theory is entirely plausible.  That is,
what could have happened, and probably did happen, is that the
mail server crashed after having forwarded a submission to
LISTSERV for distribution on SEELANGS, and then when it brought
itself back up, it no longer had a record of having forwarded
the submission, so it forwarded the submission again, which
resulted in the rejection messages.

I'll keep this short by wrapping up with the following:

1) If you ever experience aberrant behavior on the part of LISTSERV
after posting to SEELANGS, please write me.  I can't do anything
about it if I don't know about it.  This includes, by the way,
those vacation messages sent you off-list after you've posted.  They
reflect misconfigured vacation messages and I will gladly instruct
LISTSERV to stop sending list mail to those people if you forward me
those offending vacation messages.  (Should I ever set you to NOMAIL
like that, you can set yourself back by sending the command
SET SEELANGS MAIL in the body of e-mail to LISTSERV at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU.)

2) To the extent that my reply to Mr. Padunov's message contained
incorrect assumptions and/or conclusions that may have caused others to
think negatively of Mr. Padunov or his post, I sincerely apologize.

We now return you to our regularly-scheduled program, already in
progress...

- Alex, list owner of SEELANGS
--
Alex Rudd
List owner e-mail: seelangs-request at listserv.cuny.edu
Personal e-mail: ahrjj at cunyvm.cuny.edu
http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
Any opinion expressed above is not necessarily shared by my employers.

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