tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Jun 14 22:55:37 1994
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The Incredible E-Mail Deluge
- From: eli (Elias Israel - SunSelect Engineering)
- Subject: The Incredible E-Mail Deluge
- Date: Wed, 15 Jun 1994 10:55:37 +0500
It never rains but it pours!
Sometime around midnight last night, one of the mailers for one of the
readers of this list bounced a message. Nothing too special, it happens
all of the time. Someone runs out of disk space, messes up their local
delivery mechanism, closes their account without bothering to unsubscribe,
and I get the notification from their mailer daemon.
Most of the time, it's OK. I have automatic mechanisms for dealing with most
of the things that get sent to <[email protected]>,
so I don't worry about it too much. Unfortunately, this mailer daemon
decided not to follow the rules and didn't send the bounce message to
the -request alias like the header said it was supposed to. Instead, it
bounced it right back to the list!
Dutifully, the list software just echoed the message back out to everyone,
including the broken mailer, which bounced it again, sending another
message to the list. Consequently, we got auto-spammed.
Naturally, the dial-in lines that I use to check on the list picked yesterday
to fail entirely, leaving me with no way to learn about all this until
I got in this morning at 10 and discovered the mess it had made, not to
mention a few puzzled requests from alert subscribers.
I have made a change that should prevent this problem in the future. From
now on, messages from mailer daemons will not be echoed by the list software.
That should prevent this kind of bug from causing difficulty.
I apologize for not having thought of doing this before.
It may take a while for all of the noise messages to stop going to all
subscribers, since there are probably some still in the pipeline between
the list machine and all of you, so please be patient for a little while.
The whole thing should be cleared up shortly.
Elias Israel
[email protected]