[ic] Website down

[Jon Jensen]

On Tue, 14 Feb 2023, Peter Ajamian via interchange-users wrote:

> "This website www.interchangecommerce.org/i/dev is currently offline.

Thanks for the heads-up.

This has happened a couple of times in the past week, due to the Linux OOM 
killer taking out MySQL and/or Interchange, but the cause seems to be 
Mailman spinning out of control and eating up all RAM.

Until now we've never had any problem with Mailman or the rest of this, so 
we never needed to monitor it. But maybe there's some new spam that 
triggers a Mailman bug or something, so we will set up alerts for it.

On this note, I have to say I'm considering shutting down the Interchange 
mailing lists entirely.

It has become really difficult to run a public mail server due to the 
heavy amounts of spam, lots of list subscribers abandoning their free 
email accounts that fill up and reject all messages or else clicking 
"spam" instead of unsubscribing themselves, and this adds to existing 
deliverability problems to the big email providers most people use: Yahoo, 
Google, Apple, Microsoft.

The server's Postfix mail queue is always clogged with 50k+ deferred 
messages because of receiving servers saying "temporarily deferred due to 
unexpected volume or user complaints" etc. Sometimes we have to just purge 
them all to start over.

Given how little real discussion happens here in the mailing lists in 
recent years, it doesn't at all feel worth it, and we may just point 
people to the existing options of IRC and GitHub issues.

I would be sad to see the lists shut down, but the work of dealing with 
this has for years fallen only on me and Gert. It is not benefitting many 
people anymore and isn't rewarding.

Jon


-- 
Jon Jensen
End Point Corporation
https://www.endpointdev.com/