Thanks shotspine now you have replaced the other stupid song I can't get out of my head for this one :D :) JK...Sue


Doris Day
Que Sera Sera
When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother, what will I be
Will I be pretty, will I be rich
Here's what she said to me.

Que Sera, Sera,
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours, to see
Que Sera, Sera
What will be, will be.

When I was young, I fell in love
I asked my sweetheart what lies ahead
Will we have rainbows, day after day
Here's what my sweetheart said.

Que Sera, Sera,
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours, to see
Que Sera, Sera
What will be, will be.

Now I have children of my own
They ask their mother, what will I be
Will I be handsome, will I be rich
I tell them tenderly.

Que Sera, Sera,
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours, to see
Que Sera, Sera
What will be, will be.

OMG Sue
 

Thank You! Thank You! Where in the world did you find those words? In your memory? Gosh, going back many decades ago, my best friend and I sang that song in our Elementary School Talent Show. Ohhhh! The poor parents that had to listen. No, I can't sing, not even in the shower.

It's sure good to see you. I didn't see you on the CP forum much for quite awhile before the board went down. You were missed. I hope we can all keep in touch, which ever forum we land at. For me, it's just much too soon to make any decisions. Right now I'm thinking there is no reason not to be at both, but who knows? The future is not ours (mine) to see!! Personally, I just want to be reunited with all those I care about and get back to sharing, supporting and educating. I'd love to leave all the trolls and ugly stuff behind and build a big tall wall around us to keep the uglies out and an big open door for all those that want to give and take with kindness and caring. Hmmmm, suppose that can happen?

Wishing you all good things Sue!!:)

What was the other "stupid" song you had roaming around in your head? Or maybe I shouldn't know for fear of it roaming in mine too.

Hi Shotspine, I found the words using google. I do remember that song from way way back though. I knew if I didn't find the words I would sing the first part in my head over and over and over...well you get it. By the way the other song was a Barney song and my youngest is 13, I heard it in the background while talking to a friend who has a 3 year old and it was still in the memory some 10 years later. So why can't I remember anything that just happened??? I would gladly give up brain space taken up by Barney for some more relevant info :p

I was on vacation when the OBT went down. I was camping by Panguitch Lake in Utah with no phone, no TV just fresh air and fishing.:D I really like our new home here so I will be staying and hopefully many of our friends will too. At least here the mods have names and we know where they live hee hee hee just kidding mods;) :D Good to "see" you again...Sue

OT
 

Ahhhhhh, camping and fishing.......my most favorite things to do were travelling, camping, hiking......and eating fish someone else caught.:D My one and only child is about to be 40 with my youngest grandchild about to be 11. Since I lived 2500 miles away during my grandkids growing up days I have little memory of the "in" songs/trends of those years. Like you, I can remember grade school, but not this morning. Thank God for my desk calendar. If I don't write it down.....it's gone.

Thanks JD, that was nice of you to say! That song has good memories for me also.

Here's to friends like you two, where ever we land. I'm much more concerned about the posters than I am the moderators. I may change my mind though.

Que Sera Sera:)

The way mass mailings like these (assuming a mail was sent out to all members of BT and not just to a few addresses that survived the crash) are normally sent out is in packages of several hundred/thousand addresses. If the software is clever (which I will assume for this), it or the sending mail server bundles the addresses by server, eg. all addresses @aol.com are being bundled together and 1 single mail is then sent to that server. So, say 2000 thousand addresses at 20 different places are being sent a mail, the mail server (or even the board software) will create 20 mails with 100 receipients each.

As many of the providers have a maximum no. of receipients per mail (after all, spam is sent out the same way), these, say, 20 mails with 100 receipients are then broken down into chunks the receiving mail server accept, eg. max 50 receipients per mail.

So, in the end, in the example given, 40 mails are sent out with 50 receipients per mail.

For the assumed 50000 members of BT, this would mean quite a few mails.

If there is an error on any of these mails and the receiving mail server rejects a mail, none of the intended receipients in that mail will receive that mail and JL or whoever does the mail admin will receive an error/rejection msg (a bounce msg) instead.
If one of the intended receiving mail servers is down for...hmm...say 3 days...the mail will be rejected and none of the intended receipients in that mail will receive the mail either.

There are a few other problems that can happen which will result in a number of people not receiving the mail or receiving it delayed by several days.

In the case where single mails to everybody are generated, it can take a long time until all mails are sent; I calculate high at maybe 1/2 sec per mail which comes to 25'000 seconds which is several days...ok, I did say I calculated high, in reality a lot more mails could be generated but as I don't know the board software, I chose a high value as sending time.

I don't think that with 50'000 receipients, anybody would take the time and trouble to single anybody out for special treatment...a simple technical explanation is the much more likely reason why some people will or won't receive a mail.

cheers
eve

Thank you evie for explaining the packet thing to me. :D

I knew that mass mailings are often done in packets of some sort, I just never knew how (and it totally makes sense that the packets would be sorted by email provider).... and that also probably explains why I haven't gotten an email yet.

The email I used for registration at OBT is an uncommon email provider, so it's possible that the packets are being done in order of largest email providers first (AOL, yahoo, hotmail etc...) and the little ones that only a few people use would be done last.

Again, thank you for explaining the way servers sort and send the email packets... I always love learning about how things work :D

Imagine those bundles being created and queued almost at the same time. Mail servers are extremely efficient at 1 job and that is to deliver mail. This process is completely impartial and normally goes on a first in, first out base. It doesn't know about big or small, it only knows about mails in/mails out.

As an example from one of the mail servers, I administer: right now there are 16 mail queues open which means that mail is waiting to be delivered to 16 different destinations to an unknown number of receipients. This particular mail server seems to be blacklisted (=they refuse to receive mail from it) by mac.com so there are 180+ msgs in the queue and they will sit there until mac.com decides to like this server again or the 3 days waiting period are up whichever comes first. Until that time, all msgs for mac.com sit there...let's say hastypastry.net was in a similar situation then all member having a mail address at mac.com would have to wait.

A small provider is more likely to have some spam prevention measurements in place than a big one. It may accept less receipients per mail than a big one or it might use what is called greylisting (the 1st mail from an unknown provider will be refused on principle; spammers hopefully won't try again whereas legal mail server will try again after a certain time) or it may have other anti spam tactics in place...all of them will at least delay the mail delivery (greylisting) if not make it impossible (no of receipients over the limit). In the latter case, it may even lock out the offending sending server for a time completely so you wouldn't ever get the mail.

In the case of delaying tactics, the mailqueue goes to the back of the queue to be sent and waits its next turn which will normally be around 20 mins later. The more times it is refused the longer it will wait before trying again.

I use the word "normally" a lot here. This is because everything I said, all times, etc. can be adjusted by the mail admins.

These are just some of the things that can go wrong; looking at all the different ways mail can and does go wrong it is sometimes very surprising that any mail arrives where it is supposed to go.

As JL gets a msg whenever a mail couldn't be delivered, he could, in theory, resend those mails but I would bet he doesn't. It is just plain too much work. A real life example from an announcement mailing list that runs here with around 2500 receipients. For every mail that is sent, we get back several 100KBs of plain text bounce msgs immediately after sending and that again over the next few days as mail servers return errors in their own sweet time. Some of them accept the mail but return errors up to 2 weeks later. Now, bounces are plain text and contain no pictures and/or formatting...I'd say on that list about 1/5th of the member addresses produce bounces. So is it reasonable to expect the list owner to clean up 500 addresses manually for every mail he sends?

Let's apply that to BT. JL sent about 50'000 msgs (if he did send a mass mailing), 1/5th bounces back (=10'000)...would anybody expect him to clean up 10'000 mail addresses manually? No? Good, because he won't.

Have I bored everybody to tears yet? :D

cheers
eve

OMGosh....
 

The internet never ceases to humble ME!

Did JL use the BT list from that software? Or do you think he has a separate
file? I don't remember seeing 50,000 members, either, I recall the high 30,000
the last time I looked, probably in spring.

When the MAC OS came page up, soon after the mails were sent, I don't suppose
he could access the mail addresses either? How would that work? If he is restoring a database...wouldn't that preclude access? Does he have everyone's email in his own gmail acct? An address book with 30,000 names in it?

I have Yahoo... so that is a common one.

Jeeeesh....how do the spammers do it! There is probably a short cut for THEM!:rolleyes: or a robot...etc.

Thanks Evie... I needed some education on this... I just type..I have no idea what is really happening most of the time!:p

Not much difference between 30'000 or 50'000 for this. Even if all people entered valid mail addresses, there will be some with full mailboxes, etc.

I don't know this bulletin system so I don't know where the addresses are stored; with our software, some memberdata is stored in a different place so I might be able to recover them to send them mail.

:)
I don't know his setup so I don't know where he stored the addresses but assuming that he has a working backup in place, I'd guess those addresses are available on a backup and can be recovered. I doubt very much that he has them anywhere else, there are just too many of them.

I just checked to see whether I got that mail but I haven't. With the extended headers, I could probably say a bit more but this way I have no idea.

OTOH, he may just have sent out a msg to some who sent him a mail. Again, assuming that of the people who are actually active in a forum, many sent him a mail, he may have ended up with 1000+ mails all asking what is happening, some offering to help. Sending them all a reply manually would be too much so he may have just cherry picked a few.

Spammers have many different ways depending on their goal; they don't just send spams, they also collect addresses by all out attacks on servers and many other ways, try to abuse other providers mail servers for sending their stuff and only then, last but by far not least, try and send their spam/scams/etc.
If you run mail servers, the Internet is a big war place with the battles taking place on every server. I spend quite a bit of my working time battling spammers and their spams.

No need to either :) If you throw a letter into the mailbox, you don't think of all the people/machines that have to handle it before it finally arrives at the destination and this should be much the same.

Btw. the page(s) being shown right now is/are just the standard OS X server page(s) if nothing is set up yet.

cheers
eve

hi evie

here is the message i got with full headers.

From braintalk@gmail.com Sun Sep 24 18:10:08 2006
X-Apparently-To: address@yahoo.com via 66.163.178.119; Sun, 24 Sep 2006 18:10:17 -0700
X-Originating-IP: [199.201.145.187]
Return-Path: <www@localhost.localhost>
Authentication-Results: mta169.mail.mud.yahoo.com from=gmail.com; domainkeys=neutral (no sig)
Received: from 199.201.145.187 (EHLO localhost) (199.201.145.187) by mta169.mail.mud.yahoo.com with SMTP; Sun, 24 Sep 2006 18:10:16 -0700
Received: by localhost (Postfix, from userid 70) id 073361DE4804; Sun, 24 Sep 2006 21:10:08 -0400 (EDT)
To: address@yahoo.com
Subject: Braintalk Returns!
From: "braintalk@gmail.com" <braintalk@gmail.com> Add to Address Book Add Mobile Alert
Message-ID: <200609250108.77ae6d492632@brain.hastypastry.net >
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: vBulletin Mail via PHP
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 21:10:08 -0400 (EDT)
Content-Length: 331
Greetings. We had a bad software and hardware crash recently and about
a month of downtime, but Braintalk is returning! I'm in the middle of
restoring the server and installing brand new software. Thank you for
your patience, and please visit http://brain.hastypastry.net/forums in
the next few days.

Take care,
-John Lester

Hi Annie

Thank you. I deleted the mail info to keep the addresses from being harvested/collected by spammers.
I will assume that all headers are good unlike in spams where they are often faked.

X-headers are non-standard mail headers added by software on the way somewhere.
The above says that this mail was routed via the Yahoo internal mail system (66.163.178.119 is a Yahoo internal address). The originating IP points back to the IP no that is defined as belonging to brain.hastypastry.net. It could be the machine that crashed or another one that sits there in its place.

The Received: headers are the most interesting in a mail and the main reason why people who follow mails need the full headers.
Every place that receives a mail to pass on will add one received: header. Spammers often spoof them and put in fake nos, times, etc. but here I will assume that the information given is correct.

The above Received: header was added by Yahoo and says the following:
It got the mail from 199.201.145.187 which is the IP of brain.hastypastry.net.
This mail was most probably addressed to several people (for a single address, the receipients address would normally show up in that header).

The above points towards this mail having been generated programmatically; otherwise, it would have more information in it.

If the sending machine really did identify itself as localhost, I certainly would never see this mail. It would be rejected by our mail servers that insist on the sending mail servers identifying themselves with a proper name. "localhost" is, in this context, not a proper name, is very often used by spammers and therefore a mail server calling itself localhost, trying to send mail will be rejected at a lot of places.
To try and explain: you'll most probably be less likely to open the door and invite somebody inside if that somebody rings the door bell and says: "hi, my name is Smith and I have something for you", holding a weird looking package than if somebody rings the bell and says: "hi, my name is Jack Smith, here is my card clearly identifying me and the company I work for". And the same goes for mail servers.

Aha, the msg was generated by a machine calling itself brain.hastypastry.net which is defined to be the forum machine...
...and it was generated by the vBulletin software which is the forum software. So, it most probably was a mass mailing.

Again, the reminder: I assume that all headers are correct and none of them are spoofed like spammers would do it.

To summarise (with all assumptions :) ):
This was a mail generated by the forum software and it was sent via Postfix which is a mail server software. The mail we are looking at here is a mail that was sent to Yahoo mail addresses. There is no way of knowing how many people were addressed in it.

So, to answer your question, mrsd, it does seem as though the addresses either survived or were recovered. It also seems that the functionality of the forum software is at least back to a state that it can send mails again.

This mail would have been rejected at many places if hastypastry.net really did identifiy itself as localhost. At many of the places where it did arrive that have automatic spam filters, it would have ended up in the spam folder.

Curiosity won out :) ...I just went to have a look to see whether hastypastry.net attempted to send mail to me and it did. And it did try to identify itself as localhost which resulted in an automatic rejection from our end...but what I can also see is that it is taking a long time; assuming Sat. was the start of this mass mailing, the mail to me was attempted on Mon. morning (my time)/Sun. evening (local time)...it could still be at it.

cheers
eve

**Major** round of applause (stamping of feet, rolling of drums...) Eve.
What more can I say?
all the best :)

WOW! I acutally understand that! THANK YOU!!
 

Ditto WOW...
 

Thank you so much for this clarification Evie...

Not that I could do this myself, again in the future! <cough cough>

But I checked my full header too..and my mail is very similar.
My local host is somewhat different, but Yahoo has several hubs I believe.
and mine came just before annie's... and also says vBulletin mail via PHP.
( Sun, 24 Sep 2006 21:09:29 -0400 (EDT))

So perhaps JL sent the mails off, then took the server down and hence
we see that MacOS server page now.

So at least we know some of the data was okay on that server before
he took it down.

I have had some Braintalk messages from my PM box go into the spam folder, in the past.
They were not blocked, but just sent there by mistake. It was the typical
overflow automated message, that someone was trying to contact me, etc.
I can't recall if I reset my filter, I may have, because another place was having trouble too. It has been a while since that happened, so I really don't recall exactly.

This has been a real education for me! and also illustrates the complexity of the internet, and "making assumptions" about things --motives-- when in
reality it is just hardware/software complexities!

Thanks so much for walking us thru the "maze of email"!:D

AWESOME Evie!
Thanks!

evie, that has got to be the clearest explanation of anything involving a computer that i have ever seen. i hope they pay you what you are worth.

i edited out my e mail address, fortunately the edit button is now working longer. i did know better than to do it, but i wasn't sure if you needed it in there so i just posted the whole thing.

thanks very much for figuring this out and for that very clear explanation.

Translation from Computereese to Human
 

Evie,
Thank you so much for your clear explanation..though I do admit that my mind dropped off halfway through your excellent translation.

Thank you all for the compliments. :)

I work with this and other Internet related stuff every day so this is just a variation of a never ending subject :)

Annie, I have my own company and I wish I made lots of money with it :) But life interfered and while the big Internet balloon was blown up until it burst, I spent 6 months per year in hospital having surgeries and other things. I did profit from the bubble though as with any other type of company I would have had to close down whereas working in this area allowed me to stay in business :D

cheers
eve

Well I have just got in and did not have to reregister. I tried that yesterday and had no reply. When I tried again this morning I got straight in and read reregistering was unnecessary. You go in using the password and name that you had before. I have just done a post in the complementary forum and it has come up.
Val

Try again I just got straight in, there is now no need to register. My post just came up there as well in the complementary forum.
Val

Interesting. Well, didn't work for me! :rolleyes:

Maybe it's the use of a Yahoo address, don't know and right now don't care - unless and until the issue of shooting-from-the-hip moderation is addressed there. Also, information that would be useful that we all worked so hard to put togather. It would be nice to use our work to help build here rather than have to reinvestigate (in some cases I should say).