[Toybox] Gmail being weird again.

[David Seikel]

On 2024-02-05 17:39:33, Mouse wrote:
> > I was mostly offline over the weekend, and gmail refused pop3 this
> > morning [...]
> 
> > So I closed the tab and went to other windows, but next time I passed
> > that virtual desktop I clicked "get messages" in thunderbird out of
> > sheer habit... and it worked.  And I can send too.
> 
> I suspect gmail is made up of many, many machines, and not just because
> I can't imagine how one machine could handle the load.

I know Yahoo email is like that.  Very unreliable, and I get error
messages from a bunch of different Yahoo servers when it fails to
collect.  It's been doing this for many years.

Like I mentioned in my last email, Yahoo is like Gmail, I'm only using it
for ancient people with my old emails that rarely email me.

My favourite failure notice from Yahoo - "Failure: Success!!". 
Considering how often it fails, I can see that actually working might
count as a failure mode.  lol

> I don't normally send mail to gmail addresses because most of them
> can't mail me back.  But there are a few people who have other channels
> to reach me by, to whom I've sent from my own infrastructure, where I
> have a user agent I can stand.
> 
> Then, a little bit ago - a month? - I tried to send to one of them and
> Google rejected the mail with some babblage about it being
> insufficiently authenticated.  I tried again some hours - a day? -
> later and it worked fine.  I've been getting such failures
> intermittently since then, to the point where I've stopped trying.
> 
> But the point here is that the failures are intermittent.  I speculate
> that this happens because they're pushing a new version of their
> infrastructure code to their world-facing machines gradually, so it
> breaks when I happen to draw a machine with the new code on it.
> 
> And this would explain your own trouble, too: we just need to posit
> that you got a new-code machine "this morning", but an old-code machine
> "next time".  (Whether the new version that broke interop for me is the
> same as the one that broke interop for you is perhaps interesting to
> speculate about, but not very relevant from a pragmatic point of view,
> even if my guess is correct.)

-- 
A big old stinking pile of genius that no one wants
coz there are too many silver coated monkeys in the world.