[R] Why am I not getting "some" r-help posts?

[Marc R. Feldesman]

At the risk of being flamed for mortal stupidity, I'm trying to figure out 
what could have possibly changed (at my end almost certainly) that make 
Brian Ripley's posts (in particular) not show up on my mail server (at 
least not on the one where I receive my email).  All my email comes to a 
central university server from which it is forwarded to several different 
places where I can get my email more conveniently.  I've double, triple, 
and quadruple checked my .forward file and find nothing amiss [one line 
with the two servers I want the mail to go to.  This file hasn't been 
changed in more than a year]  (I don't use procmail or spamassasin on the 
central server, although they are setup and available for my use.  This is 
quite deliberate as I've got other effective spam filters on my "real" 
email systems).

So about a month ago, I noticed people responding to Prof Ripley's posts 
without me ever seeing the posts to which they were responding.  I looked 
on the main email server and found all of the originals there.  So clearly 
Brian's posts were making it out to my central mail server, from which they 
disappeared into the ether on their way to my other servers.  I started 
checking all the spam filters on the other two systems and couldn't see any 
obvious reason why this particular email address was causing trouble.  To 
be on the safe side, I deleted all the spam rules and deleted the entire 
file of rules (on both systems).  Despite this, those posts would not get 
forwarded to my preferred email systems.

I've gone back and checked with the sysadmins of our Unix system (Sequent) 
and they're clueless about what's going on.  It appears that the mail is 
being forwarded but is being swallowed somewhere downstream.

I realize this isn't an r-help problem, but with all the expertise on this 
board, I figured that someone here might have some suggestions of where to 
look.

FWIW, the email servers run either Linux or Windows XP Server 3.0 (or 
whatever it's called) and I use Eudora, Thunderbird, or webmail clients to 
read/respond to them.

Thanks for any help and/or suggestions for solving this mystery.




Dr. Marc R. Feldesman
Professor and Chairman Emeritus
Anthropology Department - Portland State University
email:  feldesmanm at pdx.edu
email:  feldesmanm at gmail.com
fax:    503-725-3905


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