Emacspeak discussion list

[Greg Priest-Dorman <gpriestdorman AT gmail.com>]

Hi Folks,

On a few occasions lately list members have asked me about "long delays"  (45 to 90 minutes) between the time they submit their post to the server and when that post gets out to all users or shows up in the archive. These times are unfortunately  "working as expected".

Emacspeak.net is a virtual machine with an allocation of 1 cpu and 1 gig of ram. We have almost 200 subscribers. Time to send a message out from the list has increased over the years as more security checks are now involved in each mail transaction. But most importantly, large sites (microsoft, google, etc) rate limit anything not using more expensive servers.  Their justification? They tell us it is because there are suspected spammers on some IP addresses "near" ours. Not us, no, but in the same range. So they rate limit entire blocks of addresses. As a result, our server has to retry most of those addresses several times before the message is  accepted.  All of this results in it taking a while to get all the messages out.

Anyway, unless we start spending a lot more each month for our virtual machine to give it  a home in a more expensive neighborhood and perhaps more resources, I don't see this changing. But this is a mailing list, not a live stream after all.

I hope this helps explain why it is this way, even if it doesn't make it go any faster. 

-Greg