Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 08:08:09 +0100
From: "Oliver Elphick" <olly@lfix.co.uk>
I got curious about the delays in mail forwarding through the mailing
lists and looked at the headers of some messages (see below). It seems
that a message arrives at hub.org and then gets sat on for a few hours
before it is sent out again. Sometimes it does an internal loop and
gets sat on twice! (By comparison, the Debian listserver resends messages
within a minute.)
The result is that messages take a long time to get out on the mailing
list and so are answered unnecessarily by several people.
Why does this happen?
We had these problems on sourceware.cygnus.com (now
sources.redhat.com), which was (and is) running a number of large
mailing lists. The problem was, in a word, sendmail. We fixed it by
switching to qmail (http://www.qmail.org/). Mail delivery on the
mailing lists dropped from hours to seconds.
Ian