[ic] Website down

[Peter Ajamian]

On 15/02/23 05:16, Jon Jensen wrote:
> 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.

It will be sad to see this list go.  I will still maintain my presence 
in IRC and on github as you say.  Anyone feel free to drop in (on IRC), 
even just to say hi, we're always there.


Peter