[sf-lug] Mail problems (or Firefox, or systemd,...)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ken Shaffer (kenshaffer80 at gmail.com):

> Anyone else having email problems?

Consider carefully if you would be better off if everyone on the SF-LUG
mailing list who's recently had any kind of e-mail problem contacted
you.  I think the answer would be 'unfortunately, not at all'.  Be
careful what help you ask for.  If you ask for useless information and
it doesn't help you, you still have the same problem except now you've
used up a bunch of your and other people's time.

Reading your two messages, looks like you were stabbing around in the
dark, hypothesising that there's a 'problem' with either Firefox, or
systemd, or NoScripts.  Why did you think that?  You didn't say.  What
does _any_ of those things have to do with e-mail.  Er, nothing (well,
except in the trivial sense that something that affects Web-browsing
might impede your ability to get to and use the Google hosted Web
interface for GMail -- but that would not actually qualify as an 'e-mail
problem').

What does 'e-mail problems' mean, i.e., what is your specific symptom?
You didn't actually _say_ what the specific symptom is.  You claim that
'systemd... stopped resolving mail.comcast.net', but you don't bother to
say why you think that.  That sounds troublingly like an interpretation
on your part, a guess, rather than a raw symptom.

If by 'e-mail problems', you mean 'Loading http://gmail.com/' in [X] Web
browser', you should say _that_ rather than 'e-mail problems',

As I'd said many times, if you want to get technical help, you really
ought to provide your raw problem symptoms, not your guesses.
Another thing:

I just took the suggestion to redirect /etc/resolv.conf to the
> /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf file instead of the
> .../stub-resolv.conf

It's a dreadfully bad idea to just start changing things without a very
clear idea about why.  All you're likely to do is start introducing
additional variables into a situation you already find confusing.
Diagnosis requires eliminating variables to find the answer, so tossing
more into the soup tends to be a step backwards.

Let's consider what you said just before that:

> Last month, systemd on my Ubuntu 18.04 stopped resolving
> mail.comcast.net.  No known changes on my part, not even an update, it
> just stopped working, but none of the other sites I visit had a
> problem.

First, when you say 'systemd stopposd resolving mail.comcast.net', there
are quite a number of problems with that statement starting with the
fact that systemd (per se) has no role in resolving DNS.

There is an optional component shipped with systemd called
systemd-resolved, a systemd 'service' that, if enabled, interacts with a
number of things including applications that use D-Bus services, but you
cited no specific reason to point to it, either.

Second, wouldn't you think it's really peculiar for _any_ DNS-resolving
software to choke on exactly one full-qualified domain name
(mail.comcast.net) and no others?  Wouldn't that be an extremely
unlikely sort of bug?  Wouldn't it be more likely that it's some other
kind of problem entirely?


When you say you 'took the suggestion', whose suggestion was that?  Did
you make sure you understood what the problem was that you were trying
to address and what the suggestion would do, before implementing it?
You really need to, you know.


Last, it's really not in your or anyone else's interest to ask for help
with e-mail problems when (best guess) you're talking about issues with
configuration of one specific Web browser.  Just sayin'.