some list messages that appear in archives are not being delivered

Hello,

I came across an unusual situation today that has me
stumped. I'm wondering if 
anyone else has seen this problem or can offer an
explanation.

One of our clients has recently signed up to a mailing list
and has reported 
that she is not receiving all of the messages posted to that
mailing list. 
This mailing list is hosted at another listserv site and has
a public 
archives.

I've been comparing the recent archives for this list to
messages received by 
our listserv server and it confirms her suspicion. Of the 42
messages in the 
list archives for May 2008, we only received 30.

This doesn't appear to be a spam filter problem. I've also
considered the list 
topics feature, but that is not being used in this mailing
list.

The only hint I have is that all of the messages we have
received for this 
mailing list in May are "short". The longest one
was 16511 bytes. Most of the 
messages that have not arrived range from several 100's to
~1500 lines 
according to the archives. But there is at least one short
message of 58 
lines among the missing, so maybe that is just a
coincidence.

This sounds like a silly question, but is there any
mechanism in listserv for 
accepting and archiving large messages but not distributing
them via SMTP? 
Any other feature that affects message distribution based on
message size or 
some other parameter?

Allan Goulding

-- 
Allan Goulding  agouldngmun.ca
Computing & Communications
Memorial University of Newfoundland
St. John's, NL, Canada A1C 5S7

Take a look at the RECEIVED lines of the messages that were
distributed to a subscriber who also missed some messages.

See if you can figure out if more than one LISTSERV host was
in the distribute chain or if the destination mail system
has multiple MX hosts (this used to drive me crazy --
secondary MXes that foul things up, but the primary works
fine).

I'm not sure how you ruled out "spam filter" since
many hosts could be involved in the distribution path.

SMTP logs would most like have some clues.

/Pete Weiss,
in beautiful soggy central PA