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Re: Vacation bombs

2002-10-15 09:39:18
Coincidentally, the procmail list had an episode of vacation messages going
to the list recently. :-\ They didn't bounce repeatedly, so maybe the
listowner can shed some light.

Michael Talbot-Wilson wrote:
Just now I am seeing an "out of office" message bouncing between the
source and a mailing list server (and therefore all subscribers
including me).  Last I looked there were strings of six or seven "Re:"s
in the subject line.  So, two questions for procmail gurus, from the
points of view both of the private recipient and the mailing list
administrator (different list).

(1)  What is a recipe that would detect these cases?  I guess it is
    easy to detect six "Re:"s, but is there a better way?  Perhaps
    this is not a job for procmail.

(2)  Is there anything that can be done (by procmail or anything else
    you know of) in the case of non-braindead list servers which
    don't accumulate multiple "Re:"s in the subject line?  In these
    cases the message will come again and again with the same subject
    line.  The desirable objective, of course, is that the same
    message will not be delivered twice.

You've just characterized the true problem, which is that it's predictable
only in retrospect.

In a lot of cases no loop detection is used by the autoresponder; in a lot
of cases the autoresponder also removes the headers that the other
autoresponder/forwarder uses.

Some people/lists use counters, and kill messages meeting certain criteria
when incidence exceeds a threshold in a period of time. That, too, has it's
drawbacks...

--

Fred Morris
m3047(_at_)inwa(_dot_)net


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