OEIS down? (and autoreplies)

[Russ Cox]

> The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
> The proxy server could not handle the request
> /GET /~njas/sequences/Submit.html
> <http://www.research.att.com/%7Enjas/sequences/Submit.html>/.
>
> Reason: *DNS lookup failure for: exspider.research.att.com*

When this happens, it should come back quickly.
Other projects besides the OEIS use the machine
exspider (the heavy-duty backend for the external web server).

> See duplicate A122700/A122769
> which is result of my repeating resubmitting
> due to OEIS server autoreply delays...

I would point out that the submission thank you page says
that if you don't get the autoreply, you should mail njas
directly, not submit again.  That eliminates the possibility
of duplicate sequences due to resubmission.

As for mail delays, Yahoo seems to have decided at some
point (perhaps as early as January) to enforce some rather
draconian polices on mail it doesn't like.  One of the things
they appear to do, in an effort to reduce spam, is to tell
the machines sending what they think has a chance of being
spam to try sending again in a few hours.  Spammers
historically don't bother, but real mail does.  In this mode,
typically once Yahoo has told the AT&T mail server to "try later",
a future attempt (for example, if you submit a new sequence
half an hour later) is let through as being one of the "later"
attempts.  Of course, the original message that started the
waiting period is still waiting, since apparently AT&T waits on the
order of six hours after being told to try again later.

The real problem here is that Yahoo is doing this too agressively,
and that what they're doing isn't particularly well supported by
all mail delivery programs.  Please complain to Yahoo rather
than submit duplicate sequences.

See, for example,
http://www.emailaddresses.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=41142
for more people complaining about Yahoo Mail delays.

You may find that it helps to add the sender (oeis at research.att.com)
to your address book.  Otherwise I found that (using Yahoo) the mail
seems to end up in my Bulk folder instead of my Inbox.  Adding oeis@
to contacts makes sure it ends up in the Inbox.  This is completely
reproducible.  I suspect that having oeis@ in contacts might disable
the delivery run-around, though that is somewhat harder to test.

If you are serious about switching, Google Mail works just find with
the OEIS auto-response.  I have not tested others.

Russ