Phew, it seems that the annoying mail loop is now disabled. Thank God
(or whatever), my hair was already graying. Although it was not at all
my fault, I think you all should have some sort of an explanation of
the mail bombing you received.
The cause was not, as I first thought, the shortage of disk space on
our mail queue; infact the shortage was _caused_ by the mail loop.
The real problem was that a subscriber had moved to another address
and the mail server there is probably some brain-dead Windows
software. Each message that was sent through the rp-ml list to this
particular subscriber got very soon sent back to the list and from
there back to him and back to the list and back to him...
So each message on the list was immediately multiplied and re-sent to
the list until our server started to choke; this was fortunate,
because if there hadn't been the problem with disk space, you all
would have received at least three or four times the number of
repeated messages you did now; we were sort of lucky.
The debug message you received yesterday was manually sent to each
individual subscriber; some people thought that it implied that they
were to blame for this, which was definitely not the case - it's
purpose was merely to probe each subscription address and see if the
loop could be located that way.
Anyway, to make a long story short: the problem is fixed (fingers
crossed, I hope I won't have to see this message again...) and the
list will continue operating as before.
During the debug process I had to clean the subscriber list of
obsolete addresses and I also deleted all the mails sent to
rp-adm@ltk.hut.fi (for obvious reasons, the mailbox had almost 7000
messages) and therefore some administrative requests may have gone
astray; please re-send them.
//zaphod
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 22:37:32 EEST