[Wine] Wine-users mail storm - long explanation

[Jeremy White]

Hi All,

>>>Clarification: I'm getting a flood of wine-users emails.

Yes, I'm seeing this too.  I spent all day today trying to
understand why this is happening, and failed, but I think
I have just now figured it out.

As far as I can tell, the flood of messages are all the
messages that were posted to the newsgroup since the last
time the newsgroup and wine-users mailman list were synchronized
(roughly last August); it appears to be about 2,000 messages
altogether.

So here is what I believe to be the whole picture:

  1.  Last April, we connected the wine-users to the NNTP style
      newsgroup comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine.

      For a brief shining moment, this worked, although we got
      a raft of complaints about exposed email addresses.

  2.  This was fundamentally misconfigured on my part.
      I used the same news server I use for my office, forgetting
      that my office ISP is different from the ISP we use for WineHQ.
      But it worked; my office ISP was forgiving, apparently.

  3.  At some point (August 2006 ish, maybe?), my office ISP wised
      up, and stopped letting this odd ball winehq box leech it's news
      feed, and started rejecting all newsgroup requests.

      This broke the connection again, and logs show my office ISP
      constantly telling the winehq box to sod off.
      (okay, '502 no permission' is perhaps not quite 'sod off', but still...)

  4.  Monday at about 1:00 am, for whatever reason, my office ISP let
      down their guard and let the winehq box come in and slurp the newsfeed.

      This meant that we pulled and queued those 2,000 messages.


  5.  Something odd happened, but mail flowed

      I clearly see the emails queued at 1:00 am, and yet they didn't start
      coming out until around 5:15 pm, after the box had been rebrained.
      I can't see any reason why those messages shouldn't have flowed
      right away.  (So I know lots of pieces, just not all of them :-/)

      Anyone who knows how to tell mailman to list the set of 'to-be-sent'
      messages, please feel free to educate me.


So at this point, best I can tell, those 2,000 messages have all gone
out or have nearly gone out, and the damage has been done, and no further
action is needed.  (Although I have formally turned off the gateway
so that this shouldn't be possible again, at least until the next
time I try to rebridge the gateway).

If, when I wake up, the mail server is still flooding the internet
with old messages, I'll see about taking more drastic action.

Sorry for the hassle.

Cheers,

Jeremy