I have complained many times about failure to e-mail between grex and AOL.
This mostly turned into a discussion about what was wrong with AOL.

I have had at least one instance of failure to transmit from Kalamazoo College
to Grex.

Today, an acquaintance called to ask if I knew why his mail was returned from
Grex@cyberspace marked "undeliverable" or "failure to deliver" or something
to that effect.  He was mailing from an internet service named INTERSOURCE.

No need to do anything on my part, I have an AOL account for important e-mail.
I think whatever prevents us from talking to AOL is not strictly an AOL
problem.  

12 responses total.

Your "acquaintance" sent mail to grex@cyberspace, and you wonder why
it wasn't deliverable?

Um, maybe because "cyberspace" isn't a valid domain name???

Ok, blame him.  He sent it to my correct Grex address. 

Is this mail issue being discussed anyplace else in the conferences?

No, everytime you bring up the subject of Grex' failure to send or receive
mail, it gets pooh-poohed.  I had to sign up to AOL to have e-mail I could
trust.  Apparantly, whatever is wrong with Grex affects AOL more than other
services, but I have had missed mail from Kalamazoo College, Eckerd College,
and an independent service in Indiana.  The senders ultimately get a "failure
to deliver" type of message.

Well, I would tell you that the AOL problem has been resolved,
but you wouldn't believe me, so I won't.

Right.  The problem was, as we suspected, on AOL's end.  Coincidedentally,
they removed the two machines that were having problems talking to Grex from
service.

(Don't bother, scg, mpcoz has already made up his mind that
this whole thing was Grex's fault, and that poor sweet AOL had
nothing to do with it.)

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If you're having trouble sending mail to grex from another site, and
keep getting "message returned after 3 days" or some such local
equivalent, find out if your site has firewalls.  If it does, chances
are that your site has improperly disabled all ICMP messages, and that
that's causing mail delivery to grex to fail.  The host at your end
probably implements RFC 1191 PMTU discovery, and needs to see the ICMP
messages that the firewall isn't forwarding, to work.  Older host
software doesn't implement RFC 1191, so sometimes this behavior can be
triggered by a host software upgrade, even though it's actually due to
overly paranoid firewall configuration.  This problem has been
"well-known" since at least march 1993 and affects other systems than
grex; it is very nicely described in RFC 1435.  Contact your site's
technical people, and ask them if they are aware of the problem and fix
discussed in RFC 1435.

Hey, I haven't "made up my mind."  I have the highest respect for all of you
and you technical abilities.  Look at it from my position, though.  I missed
a lot of valuable mail from my kids, and whenever I talked about it, I got
vague responses assigning blame without any reason.  I also got continuing
problems.  My choice was to play e-mail roulette or get off of Grex.    

Your recent response indicating AOL acknowledged the problem and fixed it by
removing the offending hardware gives me confidence that I should try it
again.

Thanks.  

(Made up my mind!  Sheesh!)

This response has been erased.

Ok, I have been using grex for non aol destinations for some time again.  I'll
start with the AOL destinations and see what happens.   . . . . . . . .

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