[BC] APNIC

[Chris Gebhardt]

FrankGott at aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 12/1/2005 1:32:28 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
> barry at oldradio.com writes:
> 
> << I have been made aware that some of you are having trouble sending 
>  email to the list today, due to something apparently called "APNIC" 
>  which is rejecting posts. >>
> There was flood of spam Tuesday.  At work I spent too much time deleting it.  
> On my AOL account their filter captured as much spam as I received in "real" 
> mail.

All,
I wanted to take a moment to address this.  The following will be too 
technical for many of you and not contain near enough detail for others, 
but hopefully it will hit its mark in offering an explanation for what 
has happened with list mail in the early part of this week.

Many of you may have noticed strange behaviors with the list email, be 
it delivery patterns, delays, or rejections.

A number of factors came into play.  One of them being an enormous 
outbreak of virus-related email, both directly and in the form of 
erroneous bounce messages.  The main problem was that the systems that 
house radiolists.net went from a couple of hundred emails in the queue 
(that is, messages that are being processed for delivery) to over half a 
million in a few short overnight hours.

Shortly after that, the main radiolists.net server began to experience 
hardware problems.  The good news is that we were able to patch it up 
while its replacement was prepared.  The bad news is that the email 
backlog went from bad to worse.

In an effort to make things more efficient and better process the mail 
out to the list, we rewrote some rules to more quickly weed the bad from 
the good.  The rules worked exactly as they were told.  Unfortunately, 
being written by humans, they had a flaw that lumped some of you in with 
spammers from the Asian-Pacific region, hence rejecting your email. 
(APNIC is one of the worlds handful of regional organizations in charge 
of assigning and delegating IP addresses... there won't be a quiz, but 
if you are interested, those of us in North America have IP's assigned 
by ARIN, and our European friends fall under RIPE.)

We have placed the regular rules back into production now, which are 
time-tested and quite effective.  By now the server has processed all 
the queued (legitimate) email.

The radiolists.net server has also now been replaced with a system with 
approximately 4 times the performance capability.  We made this 
transition with no downtime to list mail intake and immediate 
restoration of list info, subscriber lists and archives.

All log-jammed email has been delivered at this point, although I'm 
aware that for some of you that meant posts coming in out of sequence or 
in large batches.

You have my apologies for any inconveniences the strange list behavior 
from a couple of days ago has caused.  Please know that we take our jobs 
very seriously here at VIRTBIZ and will continue to do everything 
possible to ensure this online community remains the reliable and 
enjoyable resource we've known it to be.

Some of you may be interested to know that of the total email intake on 
our network (we provide service for closing in on 70,000 domains ranging 
from personal to mom & pop to Fortune 500), an average of fully 73% is 
rejected as spam.  5% is rejected as containing virus or harmful 
content.  So you can tell we're pretty serious about keeping our email 
delivery clean.  It's a lot of work sometimes, but the payoff is a 
better email experience for our subscribers.

If you have any questions, or ongoing issues please feel free to contact 
me or the list admins off-list.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled BC related traffic.
-- 
Chris Gebhardt
VIRTBIZ Internet Services
chris at virtbiz.com | (866) 4-VIRTBIZ