| Thursday,
August 19, 1999 Think of the
next stuff as a learning experience. It's the difference between a column,
in which you will not see all the gyrations I went through and all the bum
hypotheses I came up with, and a day book, where I keep trying different
things and theories. Obviously I wrote this paragraph after I sort of
understood what was happening. It may still be worthwhile to go through my
learning experience as I did.
Begin here:
It may be that my ISP had problems last
night. Let's hope so. But it can't be a good sign when I am logged on to
Earthlink.net and ping earthlink.net gets timed out every time. I can ping
nearly anything else.
So. I have disconnected from Sherman Oaks and reconnected to Earthlink
through Burbank. Hah. Now at least I can ping Earthlink and get a return.
Maybe I should QUICK try to send a message to my subscribers...
I am informed by an Earthlink official that "you will never be
able to ping Earthlink because we don't respond." The problem
with that is that sometimes it DOES respond. Now I can understand trying
to control pings a lot of them can use up resources, but on the other
hand, that's a quick way to test whether the service exists or not.
I have sent another test message "Part four ALL" to subscribers;
we will see who gets that if anyone. This is driving me mad...
All right. It has been returned. Did ANYONE get Part Four -- All? (DO
NOT RESPOND to this. I have done other test mailings. You need not respond
to them.)
I clearly need a new mailing system. First, one that doesn't reject
everything if one address is bad. Second, it has to be able to import from
the Outlook lists.
And my advice is simple here: DO NOT USE OUTLOOK 2000 if you really
intend to do anything with mail. End panic mode.
That turns out to be the wrong advice. See
later.
This is an attempt to
think rationally. My problem is that I have mail lists to maintain.
Outlook isn't perfect at that, but it isn't too bad: I get new mail, go to
the contacts list, enter a new name or make address changes, and that's
that. And for a long while that worked, and I could then send to all the
people on that mail list.
Now that is not working. I send to the entire list, and I get a message
saying that all the recipients were rejected. Some or all may have been;
there's no real way to know.
What I need, then, is a mail viewing system to substitute for Outlook,
which isn't working properly and hasn't since I changed to 2000 from 98.
Among other problems, if you have multiple mail accounts, 98 would tell
you which one it was sending to, which it was receiving from, and report
failure if any of those operations failed. The error messages were not
perfect but at least there were some, and you had some chance of figuring
out what was going on.
Outlook 2000 sends an animated little fluff of no value that says
"sending and receiving". That's it. If something fails you do
not know if the failure was in sending or in receiving. This is a major
annoyance.
But mostly then OUtlook 2000 sends to a list, if anything on the list
is invalid -- a bad character in the address, and possibly trying to
send to a gate that rejects it -- then everything is rejected with a
stupid message that says, for each and every address on the list, that
The following recipient(s) could not be reached:
'jerryp@jerrypournelle.com' on 08/19/1999 10:57 AM
No transport provider was available for delivery to this recipient.
'jerryp@earthlink.net' on 08/19/1999 10:57 AM
No transport provider was available for delivery to this recipient.
and on and on for hundreds. It gives NO CLUE as to which message
was rejected, and it makes no attempt to send to the ones that were not
rejected. This must be the worst excuse for a mail handling program I have
ever heard of, and anyone who uses Outlook 2000 must either know things I
don't -- and I wish they would tell me!! -- or -- I am tempted to say be
the biggest fool in Christendom, but I suppose that is too extreme. Let us
just say that they haven't yet discovered what I have discovered.
My long term choice is to find a mail handler that (1) Works in Windows
2000, (2) knows how to import from Outlook 2000 contact lists, and (3) can
handle large mailing lists, rejecting all but ONLY those with bad
addresses, and informing you specifically which were rejected.
I have had Eudora recommended to me, and my ONLY hesitation is I do not
know whether it imports from Outlook. If worse comes to worst I suppose I
can find a way to get my mailing list over to another mail program by
hand; anything beats the time wasted on this.
Apparently part of the problem is Earthlink which, when there is a LONG
list, will glitch just enough to reject one name, after which all are
rejected.
This is all very silly and very time wasting when I have many better
things to do including trying to do a report on our night on Mount Wilson,
where they get better images using adaptive optics than we get from Hubble
in space. But I can't do that until I solve the mail problems.
===
OK two things. I have played about with the currentmail: Mr. Rice found
some odd 'div' statements in there that looked fishy. He tried his hand at
making a new page, but it was extremely wide. I have tried my hand at
cleaning it up now that I knew to look for 'div' and I think I have
managed it. Try current mail now...
Regarding the mailing lists: I have ordered the latest and greatest
Eudora, (I had an older one, but if I am going to convert, forty bucks is
not really money) and I will see how easy or hard it is to get from
Outlook to Eudora for mailing lists.
I have also sent test mailings to parts of my list to see if I can
isolate precisely what it blowing up the list. This is taking all day, I
will not get the Wilson reports done, but I do have some good column
material.
I have put up the names and addresses of those we can't get to. See badmail.
I have deleted all previous stuff and put on only the results of the 18/19
August attempts. If you are on this list, there is something wrong. Wrong
enough, in some cases, to blow up Outlook 2000, although what's happening
there is complicated: if I send to a list that has a lot of rejects, then
the whole darned list is rejected; if I break that list into parts, then I
get messages back about those and only those whose mail was
returned/rejected. This sorry excuse for a mail handling program
apparently just doesn't know how to deal with lists at all.
Whether I can export my list to Eudora and use that I don't know. I
suppose it is an interesting experiment. I am very weary of interesting
experiments.
OK, I think I know what is going on, partly due
to Bob Thompson.
First, it's not really Outlook's fault entirely. Outlook has useless
error messages, but it is sending the mail. Earthlink then gets the mail,
and if there is some number of bad addresses in it, or perhaps some
quality of bad address, it rejects the entire list. The whole list.
Outlook then sends me a useless error message listing one at a time every
address on the list and saying there was no transport provider for it.
If I break the list apart, then I get back individual error messages
about those rejected. I have now, at some cost in time, moved all those
bad addresses to a separate list. I will attempt to mail to it later, and
I will list it on badmail. And I have now mailed to the purged list: we
will see if that goes through. If not I will have to break it up into
lists and try again.
Apparently the problem is an interaction between the mail server and
outlook, and the solution is going to be a bit hairier than I thought. I
have ordered Eudora Pro and I will try to move my list to that just to see
what happens; I'll make one with and one without the bad list and see if
Earthlink reacts differently to that. And I will try to make a deal with
pair.com for a secure mail server connection through them, passworded for
sending, so that it can't be used by spammers but I can send through it.
Then I can use it for my lists.
And the PURGED LIST mailing just returned to me; this is a Good Sign,
since bounced ones don't usually come to me. (That is I received it as an
ordinary recipient; which I hope means that ALL subscribers for whom I
have good addresses now have that message.)
Let me recapitulate: the full list was rejected, each and every
message. When it was broken into parts, most of the parts went through.
When there was a bad address, then I got a message about undeliverable
mail, but the list as a whole went out. However, in two partial lists,
there were multiple bad addresses, and when that happened, the ENTIRE
PARTIAL LIST was rejected. Breaking that down into smaller parts got it
through, once again with individual messages about undeliverable mail. Of
my entire list about 20 were "bad" in the sense that the mail
was returned as undeliverable. In the rejected partial list I believe
there were six.
I conclude then that Earthlink (not OUTLOOK) rejects mail lists if the
list contains some number greater than 4 and certainly if greater than 7
of bad addresses, this without regard to the length of the list. (That
turns out not to be the case: I sent mail to ALL the "badlist"
plus myself, and while they were rejected, the one to me came through;
apparently the list must be of a certain length AND have a certain number
of bad addresses; then the whole list is rejected.) When the list is
rejected Earthlink returns the whole mess to Outlook, which generates a
system administrator message that contains each and every name on the
list, with the note that no transport medium could be found for that name.
Clearly that would not be true had EARTHLINK's server not rejected the
list. When it did that, Outlook had no more information than that the list
didn't go through.
When the list contains fewer than 4 bad addresses, then Earthlink
accepts it, apparently without regard to the length of the list, and sends
it along; and sends back messages about each rejected address.
I then purged all the rejected mail and sent a message to my entire
list, and that seems to have gone through; so the list length doesn't
matter provided that there are not too many bad addresses in it; how many
is too many I do not yet know, although I am certain that if your list is
greater than 100 and contains 7 or more bad addresses it will be
rejected.. I have one more test, to put seven known bad addresses into the
list, then six, then five, and see at what point it starts returning
individual badmail messages instead of rejecting the entire list. I'll let
that go for a while. Atter tag, atter tag.
But I do not believe that changing to Eudora will make a big
difference; It might, though, because Eudora may handle the returns
better. Or something. I'll try that next. Then Pegasus. We're off on
a learning experience....
It has been a lesson... An interesting lesson -- I would as lief
not have too many more interesting experiences this week.
And I have a baby mocking bird I have to feed. Fell out of the nest.
With luck mother will find it and take over.
May be a finch rather than a mocking bird.
I was fooled by the markings. In any event the bird is viable once taught
to eat and fly. Another obligation...
There is a LOT of mail about the mail lists. And I found the problem
with Netscape and currentmail so it is safe to go look there now. I don't
UNDERSTAND the problem, but I found it and I think it will not crash
Netscape any longer.
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