Shal,

Thanks for letting me play in your sandbox.? Here's what happened:

• When I tried to join the subgroup while logged in, I received the error banner "You cannot subscribe to this subgroup until you are a member of the parent group", however a request was made to join the main group (I only knew that because I received the "Pending Subscription" message)
  
• When I was logged out, but tried to join the subgroup using an email? address groups.io recognized, I was told via an error banner that I needed to login before I could join the group.
• When I was logged out, and tried to join using a new email address, I received two error banners: "Your account is not confirmed. You will not be able to participate in any groups until your account is confirmed", and "You cannot subscribe to this subgroup until you are a member of the parent group." I received two emails immediately:
  
• The first email was from the subgroup asking me to follow a link to confirm my email address (which I did). The email body told me how to post to the subgroup.
• The second email was the "Pending Subscription" message from the main group.
• When the request to join the main group was accepted, I received "Welcome" and "Guidelines" emails from the main group. I was not subscribed to the subgroup.

So, the bottom line is

• If I was logged in, or using a new email address, a subscription request to the main group was sent without my knowledge.
• When I used the new email address, which generated the "email confirmation" email, it came from the?subgroup and implied that I'd be subscribed to the subgroup (i.e. it told me where to send email if I wanted to post to the subgroup).
• I was not subscribed to the subgroup.

In my opinion, this flow could use use some attention. At the very least, the user should be told what is, and is not, happening (i.e. subscription request to the main group, but no request to join the subgroup). (Personally, I'd? prefer that the user need to approve the request to subscribe to the main group before it's actually made -- maybe he'd rather not join either if that's the condition.) Also the initial account email confirmation should not reference the subgroup, if the subgroup subscription isn't part of the deal.

Thoughts?

-Don

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Glenn,

HELO groupmanagersforum.groups.io

LOL!

The typical way of scaling such things is to use horizontal scaling
with a load balancer front end that has session traffic marking.

This sounds like a description of inbound load balancing, but I imagine that outbound sort-of mirrors it.

I know that Yahoo Groups' outbound system sorted the traffic by destination domain and generally sent batches of messages to each domain in order to reduce transaction overhead. They also used a fleet of outbound servers (physical, in the day, possibly virtual later) covering a large number of IP addresses - something Lena has tracked over the years, and which at one time was listed here to help mail services with whitelisting them:


But Groups.io is built out of much more modern stuff (hardware and software), and as yet anyway likely carries much less traffic, so its structure is likely much different.

All of a transaction usually takes only seconds,

Back in March Mark commented that outbound traffic was peaking near 5M messages per day, which is something like 60 per second. So clearly a fair amount of parallelism is required in the transaction handling. And would be anyway, just to avoid stalling on a particularly slow destination server.

Whether that load can be handled in a single modern-day server, or requires multiples, and in the latter case whether the multiples can hide behind some form of edge concentrator to appear as a single outbound IP address is where my curiosity lead.

Where it has an impact on we users is when destination services use IP-based filtering, and need to maintain a whitelist or reputation database. As apparently is the case with Outlook/HotMail. In the extreme case you end up with something like Yahoo Group's server list that must be published. Though from what Mark (and the posting cited below) said it seems there are now more official "back channel" ways to communicate server addresses between senders and receivers.

Before Lena's answer I thought perhaps the cited IP address might have been a new one, causing the disruption because it was unknown to Outlook/HotMail. That is, I thought this might have been an instance similar to this (though years old):


But if there's only been one Groups.io outbound IP then that's not Outlook/HotMail's excuse.

Shal


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Hi Lena!

> groups.io uses only one outbound server (a SMTP proxy): 66.175.222.12

Thanks, I was kind of wondering about that but wasn't sure.

I don't know enough about modern systems configuration (and all the available edge devices) to guess whether that can remain true as Groups.io grows.

Shal

HELO groupmanagersforum.groups.io

SMTP is a state-in-transaction protocol, meaning that during a transaction (sending a single message) there is state (mostly keeping track of what stage of the protocol we are in) during a transaction, but there is no state in-between transactions.

The typical way of scaling such things is to use horizontal scaling with a load balancer front end that has session traffic marking.? The basic idea is that if you have three servers, Alice, Bob and Charlie that are all identical in terms of SMTP processing, and someone sends a message. The balancer may assign this transaction to Charlie and then all packets for this transaction (session, in load balancer terms) will be routed to Charlie.? Once the transaction is completed, the session info is deleted and the next message may to go Alice, to Bob or to Charlie again, route to that host for that transaction and so on.?

There are different policies for choosing which of Alice, Bob or Charlie is chosen for a particular session, the two most common are random assignment and assignment to the host with the least number of sessions at the time of decision.

All of a transaction usually takes only seconds, the sender perceives it as the time between clicking send and a notification from their MUA that the mail was sent.

Best,

Glenn

QUIT

I just told my group about it and made it a locked speckal notice so no replies are wanted. But hopefully it will get people's attention.

Take care

Nancy,

If a person uses the mute hashtag option the message will still be in
digest or summary - correct?

Not in a digest. Muting or Following have the same effect in digest content as for individual messages.

I'm uncertain about whether the Summary content reflects an individual's Muting or Following choices.

Shal


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On Sun, Jun 10, 2018 at 09:21 am, Nancy in Renton wrote:

If a person uses the mute hashtag option the message will still be in digest or summary - correct??

I haven't tried all the combinations, but a muted topic should never be included in the emails received from the group.

What about if a person creates a message with automatic timeout, does that message show in email or digest that it has an expiration date?

No, there's no indication of when the timeout will happen, it just does.

Duane
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My group choose individually either digest and individual email delivery. I’m trying to understand #hashtag options.

If a person uses the mute hashtag option the message will still be in digest or summary - correct??

What about if a person creates a message with automatic timeout, does that message show in email or digest that it has an expiration date?

Maybe I’m overthinking it,
Nancy

Marie,

Weird stuff going on! I just had a member contact me that her email
address is in the footer of every email I have been sending to the
group.

No, only in every email message she receives.

This is a new feature, the subscriber's address is put in the footer of every message to that subscriber. Its purpose is to identify the addressee of each message, so that support can better help with unsubscribe requests. See:
/g/GroupManagersForum/wiki/Footers

Shal


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On my test Group I just get the message
You cannot subscribe to this subgroup until you are a member of the parent group.
when I click on the Join button

Weird stuff going on! I just had a member contact me that her email address is in the footer of every email I have been sending to the group. I did not put her email in the footer messages. Her email address is not there in the admin settings for the footer messages. It is so weird! Has anyone ever had this happen before? She has an AOL email address. Would that have anything to do with it?? Any help or ideas would be much appreciated! Thank you so much!
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Tagger

Hi Lena!

groups.io uses only one outbound server (a SMTP proxy): 66.175.222.12

Thanks, I was kind of wondering about that but wasn't sure.

I don't know enough about modern systems configuration (and all the available edge devices) to guess whether that can remain true as Groups.io grows.

Shal


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On Sat, Jun 9, 2018 at 05:44 pm, Shal Farley wrote:

that Groups.io
outbound server, and all Groups.io's other outbound servers

groups.io uses only one outbound server (a SMTP proxy): 66.175.222.12

Ken,

Hi Mark,

Mark Fletcher is not a member of GMF, this is a user-to-user group.

I received the "due to IP reputation" message and they referenced IP
66.175.222.12 ( web01.groups.io )
Which I tried pinging, but received timeouts.

It is pretty normal for servers on the internet to turn off echo (ping) support as a partial defense against DDoS attacks.

Shal


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lev,

For example, the most recent message is from "bikelots!", so I copy
that from the screen and paste it into the search box, but nothing
comes up.

The search finds message content, not the sender's name.

To look for messages from a specific person find a message from that person and used "All Posts By This Member" in the More menu. Or, find the person in the group's Directory (if available).

Shal


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How do I search for messages?

While I would have assumed that I should click on search, enter the search term, and click on the submit button, that is not working. For example, the most recent message is from "bikelots!",?so I copy that from the screen and paste it into the search box, but nothing comes up.?

If you tell me it takes time until the message is in the search index, so I ask how much time? I have a new group, and this user entered many messages besides this most recent one, but only one message comes up.

Thank you.

开云体育

NEW: You can now change the owner of a photo album.
NEW: You can now change the owner of an individual photo.

These will be a help for groups where the moderator had to copy photos
manually, or replace photos with resized ones.

Just the other day I found this out on my group, and I thought I had discovered an unknown way to change or assign an owner to a photo album. I was so excited to share my discovery with everyone, and now Mark just blew the wind out of my sails...lol

This fix along with being able to move pictures is a big plus! Now if we could reorder pictures, and do mass deletes. ?

Don

An update from Mark -

Duane
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Supanut.

Starting yesterday, I found out that I'm not receiving any emails from
Groups.io when a new topic or reply of a topic I followed has been
posted to one of the groups I've subscribed to.

Or, it could be this:

[beta] Outlook/Hotmail delivery issue


Hot off the presses.

Shal


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