The Murphy Builders Site

As IÂ’m sure most of you have noticed by now, the list server hasnÂ’t been
working 100% this last weekÂ… duplicate messages, long delays before your
posts showed upÂ… etc.



Well I finally got a chance to dig into it this morning, and all I can say
is what a mess!



Unfortunately for all of you, it also means a change to the way I will run
the system. The change is just thisÂ… no more personal accounts. The only
way to view the archives from this point forward, is to use the public
account. Just as a reminder, the public account has a username of “rebel”,
and a password of “builder”.



For most of you this is not really that big a deal, but for about 30 or so
of you that were using your dcsol.com account to receive list messages, it
means youÂ’re going to have to subscribe again with some other email
account. You can setup a gmail or yahoo account, or any one of the free
accounts if you donÂ’t want to use your primary email accountÂ… but all the
dcsol.com accounts have been deleted, and the site is now closed. By
closed I donÂ’t mean itÂ’s gone, I simply mean you cannot create new
accounts anymore.



This also means, that you will no longer be able to post messages directly
to the web siteÂ… you must post all messages via email to the list serverÂ…
rebel-builders@dcsol.com



For the few of you that used NNTP to access the archives, contact me
directly and weÂ’ll see about setting something up so that will work for you
again. But for now nobody will be able to access the news server because
all the accounts have been deleted. What I may end up doing is opening it
up to the public in read onlyÂ… and still requiring posts to come in via
email.



OKÂ… so now for the why.



Somebody used their free Rebel Builder dcsol.com email address to send out
spam! In the last 5 days my system had processed 3.6 million bounced
messages, and still had 216,000 sitting in the queue waiting to be
processed.



This massive message queue is why the system was processing your messages
so slowly. It was also causing the SMTP service (the actual mail process
on the server) to crash repeatedlyÂ… so I had a process monitoring it and
restarting itÂ… which in turned caused lots of duplicate messages.



I apologize for any inconvenience this causes anyoneÂ… IÂ’ve always been very
proud of how clean my system has stayed in the 14 Å“ years IÂ’ve run the
builders listÂ… IÂ’m pretty sure I can count on one hand and have fingers
left over how many times spam has made it through to the list. And while
this may not have made it onto the list at all, in many ways it was much
more destructive. I will now have to apply and provide assurances to many
spam black list servers out there that the problem has been addressed to
get my domain removed from the list of bad guys.



Well, I think IÂ’m going to just stop right hereÂ… IÂ’m still pissed enough
over the whole deal I may just end up saying something IÂ’d regret if I
didnÂ’t.



Mike