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

[Marc R. Feldesman]

At 01:59 PM 1/28/2005, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
 >"Marc R. Feldesman" <feldesmanm at pdx.edu> writes:
 >
 >> 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).
 >
 >Did you remember to turn off the Oxford-sarcasm filter? ;-)
 >
 >        -p

that was the first one I turned off :-)

Really, I have NO filters whatsoever on the primary email server, which is 
why it lets through everything including Brian's emails to r-help.  What 
seems to be happening is that when emails get forwarded on to my "real" 
email systems (not the University's system but my private home network and 
my private office network), they simply vanish without a trace.  I don't 
use procmail, forward or spam assassin on any of these network systems and 
the email clients all have their own built-in filters.  If I manually 
forward Brian's messages from my University's main network they will now 
arrive at my office network, but not my home network.  But automatic 
forwarding doesn't send any of his messages anywhere.  On my home system, 
the one I'm writing from right now, I use Eudora Pro 6.0.3.  It has its own 
proprietary version of spam filtering (built on spam assassin).  Its rules 
and filters are easily accessible and I've renamed the whole filter file so 
that NOTHING gets filtered at all.  I've even turned off the built in spam 
filtering so that it will do nothing to process these messages.  Still no 
messages from Brian Ripley.

If I didn't have such high regard for Brian's comments, I wouldn't bother 
pursuing this as vigorously as I do.  After all, I still *can* read his 
comments if I go to the main mail server, but that really defeats the 
purpose of the forwarding system setup.

So I persist in trying to sort this all out.  I have talked in greater 
detail with our Unix team and they are investigating this on several 
parallel lines.  They are checking external filter configurations on their 
server to make certain that somewhere along the line Brian or Ripley (but 
not ox.uk) didn't get inadvertently killfiled as Peter (or someone else) 
suggested.

I'll post back when I get to the root of this.  Thanks for all the private 
and public suggestions.  I did really enjoy the "Brian Ripley sarcasm 
filter".  However, as a fan of sarcasm of the British variety, I rather 
revel in reading Brian's tart comments.  They sound an awful lot like some 
of things I write on student papers.

Cheers and thanks again,




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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