Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 17:08:05 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Missing messages
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

Last month Ron Kean noticed that one of his messages never showed up
here.  I found it in my log file on Panix, so I thought it had gone
through, but when I checked a spare mailbox at MIT which I subscribed
to this list as an offsite backup, I saw that it had not.  I then
noticed it was in some "junk" files on Panix, and I figured out how
to make it, and four other stuck messages, go through.

I've since kept an eye on things, and unstuck two more messages.
I don't know what causes them to get stuck.

I recalled that I had deleted similar "junk" files months earlier, not
realizing they were important.  I figured that meant other messages
were never sent to this list, and since those "junk" files were not
backed up anywhere, there was nothing I could do about it now.

But then it occurred to me that I still had a complete archive of the
list, since day one, on MIT.  So it was a simple matter (for certain
values of "simple") to look for any differences between that archive
and the one on Panix.

There were thousands of differences, since message headers look
different on every system.  But I was able to weed them out, and focus
only on differences that made a difference.

I located ten messages that never got sent.  I've extracted them from
my Panix archives, and since this is a quiet day on the list, I will
send them momentarily.

Note that this represent only about one third of one percent of all
messages.  That's a much better record than most email lists have.

I also found many other messages had been truncated.  Apparently
messages get cut off whenever there's a dot alone on a line.
Fortunately, most of these truncations were deliberate, by Ron Kean,
who evidently knew about this effect already and used it to snip those
annoying Juno taglines from his messages.  Other than those, and dots
that just happened to be at the end of messages, I located eight
messages that warrant resending.

I'm not sure whether the truncation happens at the sending or the
receiving end.  If the latter, it's possible that for some of you
they weren't truncated.

I will resend them momentarily, with a trailing blank after the
offending dots.

I had to make one tiny modification to some of the messages.  Last
January I said that filtering out all messages containing the name of
a certain African country wasn't practical, as it would result in too
many false positives.  Unfortunately, I've recently been forced into
doing exactly that.  Despite all my filters, including the blocking
of every message that was actually from that country (which most
that claim to be really are, believe it or not) I was getting over
a hundred a day, some of them quite long.  And it was increasing by
about 10% to 20% a week.

Knowing that many (most?) other people are already doing the same, I
reluctantly updated my filters to trash all such message.  They won't
appear in my Panix archives, my MIT archives, or anywhere else.  So
I've replaced the first vowel in the country's name with a * wherever
it was mentioned in the 18 messages I'm resending.

Ironically, that country never would have been mentioned on this list
except for all the spam from there.

See you this evening.
--
Keith F. Lynch - kfl at keithlynch.net - http://keithlynch.net/
I always welcome replies to my e-mail, postings, and web pages, but
unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam) is not acceptable.  Please do not send me
HTML, "rich text," or attachments, as all such email is discarded unread.