[rpd] list archives show strange ... and delays

[Willy Manga]

[**wearing no hats**]

Hello Jordi,


On 08/10/2020 12:53, JORDI PALET MARTINEZ via RPD wrote:

> Hi all, and AFRINIC IT,

> 

> I find a couple of issues with this mailing list.


I do not think there are issues per se. AFRINIC will likely confirm it.
But let me explain below why.



> 1) There is a delay from sending an email to getting it back. I use lists, such as IETF and other RIRs, with many thousands of subscribers, and there is no such delay. Can that be resolved? For example, this email is being sent at 10:53:00 UTC+2, let's see when it comes back.


what is the exact number we are talking about here ?

In my humble opinion, you need to pull statistics over a long period and
you need to agree on "what is the delay to consider as being
problematic" to confirm there is an issue.

If you subscribe to a mailing-list and want to receive emails one by one
(instead of digest mode) , I humbly think you should be worry if you got
any new email after 1 hour.
In practice it can be less BUT that should not be a concern modulo the
delay you consider as critical.
There are many smtp servers, spam,antivirus and whatever software
analysis along the path between lists.afrinic.net and your mailbox.

Besides, remember that email is *asynchronous* ; it's not built for
_live_ discussion. It's not a must to get an email ... 10 seconds

If we only consider your email, actually you should not worry.

TL;DR answer: the delay was 34 seconds.

Let's look the mail headers.

Your email to AFRINIC (A):

Received: from mail.consulintel.es ([2001:470:1f09:495::5]:4986)
 by mx2.afrinic.net with esmtp (Exim 4.84_2)
 (envelope-from <prvs=1550742d86=jordi.palet at consulintel.es>)
 id 1kQRfk-00021N-Fz
 for rpd at afrinic.net; Thu, 08 Oct 2020 08:53:13 +0000

------------

From AFRINIC to my mailbox (in google) (B)

Received: from lists.afrinic.net (lists.afrinic.net. [2001:42d0:0:200::4])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id
u5si4209596wro.14.2020.10.08.01.53.47
        (version=TLS1_2 cipher=ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 bits=128/128);
        Thu, 08 Oct 2020 01:53:47 -0700 (PDT)

---------------------------

If we stick to UTC:
Arrival (B) : Thu, 08 Oct 2020 08:53:47 +0000
Departure (A): Thu, 08 Oct 2020 08:53:13 +0000


Total duration: 34 seconds

Of course from AFRINIC to any rpd's subscriber mailbox it may depends on
many many reasons as explained above.





> 2) This is even worst. When I look into the archives, the emails are saved in a modified way. For example, I just emailed https://lists.afrinic.net/pipermail/rpd/2020/011634.html, and my text under "The reasons for this are:", appears without the numbers and not formatted as the email I send (and the one I got back).


Actually Jordi, your emails are not easy to read for those who prefer to
read emails in plaintext :) . I, for instance have to switch to the
"HTML view" to read your emails.

Mailman version 2 keeps emails in plain text and use it to generate the
web page.
It's your mail user agent (Microsoft-MacOutlook/16.41.20091302)  which
is producing emails in a format not well understood by other "more
standard" mail client software.

If you refer to that email [1], even my mail user agent (Mozilla/5.0
(Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:68.0) can not display your bullet
points. I need to view your message as "Original HTML" to see your
formatting. (I prefer to read emails in plaintext by the way)

1. https://lists.afrinic.net/pipermail/rpd/2020/011634.html

Besides, I even recall that Owen Delong, 1 or 2 years ago mentioned that
he has the same difficulties to read correctly your emails. Sorry I
cannot find the reference now but I'm pretty sure those who read emails
in plaintext can confirm as well.

Conclusion: it's not an issue with Afrinic mailman.

P.S: I think with mailman3, you can keep that formatting in the html
archives page but I doubt the migration is straightforward :)

-- 
Willy Manga
@ongolaboy
https://ongola.blogspot.com/

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