Re: Large delays in mailing list delivery?

[Thomas Guyot-Sionnest <thomas@guyot-sionnest.net>]

On 2021-12-03 14:58, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 03, 2021 at 11:52:58AM -0800, Elijah Newren wrote:
>> Are there some rather large delays in mailing list delivery these
>> days?  Anyone know who to contact to investigate?  [*]
> The right person to contact is postmaster@vger.kernel.org, however I can
> actually answer your question (despite not actually being in charge of
> vger.kernel.org). Periodically, Gmail decides that there's just too much
> incoming mail for some accounts and will arbitrarily delay delivery by
> returning a "this account is receiving too much mail, please try later."
>
> I am willing to bet that this is what happened to you.

I have already contacted postmaster and they are aware, however you add
very good point. Somehow I knew it but it's the way you put it that made
me realize: the emails are sent in bulk to gmail (to many or all
recipients for a single copy at once). The mail header even shows this,
listing the first recipient followed by "+ 99 others". If it's delayed
for all because of a single recipient that can only be because the 4xx
error is returned at the end of the DATA command (rather than on a
specific RCPT TO command), so no way for the sender to retry that single
faulty address alone later.

I'm not sure if their software allows it but I suggested sending to a
single recipient at a time for gmail, that would solve the issue.

In the meantime what I did is switch my subscription to another email
using a forwarder address on a domain I own - I still haven't received
all the backlog but at least I'm getting new posts timely now.

Regards,

--
Thomas