Slowness of GnuCash email lists

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Some of you may have noticed the extreme slowness of email going through
the gnucash lists.  I've tracked this down to a broken DNS server which
has caused SIGNIFICANT delays in delivering mail.  For example if was
talking 5-10 seconds PER DELVERY per message due to the broken DNS,
instead of 0.1-0.2 seconds per delivery.

On top of that, the server has been receiving subscription spam; someone
hitting the mailman subscription URL directly to attempt to forge a
bunch of subscriptions.  I've temporarily blocked the offending IP
address, but longer term I'll need to rate-limit that.

The result was that there were over 13,000 email messages in the mailman
outbox.  At 5-10 seconds per message it would take 36-48 hours to clear
the queue.  Of course each subscription request would add another 5-10
seconds to that delay.   OOPS.

Anyways, I've manually cleared out the queue of all the subscription
spam and now it's working on ~300 messages that didn't match my query
(possibly subscriptions in other languages).  Mailman is currently
clearing out the outbound queue and, at the current rate, should be done
by about 10pm US/EDT at the latest.

Of course, you probably wont see *this* message until then.  :-/

I've put a few temporary fixes into place until I can positively fix the
broken DNS server.

I appologize for the issues, but of course nobody brought it to my
attention (and I only noticed by accident when I was trying to figure
out why one of my own message didn't make it back to me in a timely
fashion).

Thanks,

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available