[Mailman-Users] Out-of-office replies

[J C Lawrence]

On Mon, 22 Jan 2001 00:38:08 -0800 
G Armour Van Horn <vanhorn at whidbey.com> wrote:

> One of my Majordomo lists recently went nuts because of a
> subscriber who left town with an autoreply in place, one that
> responded to every incoming message. Obviously, such a feedback
> loop had quite an impact - luckily I caught it in less than two
> hours when "only" 114 of these messages had been sent out from the
> list. I've had the same thing happen in the distant past with a
> Mercury list.

It is amazing how many vacation implementation are written by the
(hopefully terminally) clueless.

> Does Mailman provide any protection from this?

Unless the vacation program quotes back the message it is reponding
to, it is difficult for Mailman to distinguish between a vacation
loop and am active poster.  That said, implementing something like
Formail's MsgID cache for Mailman, except instead of cacheing
MessageIDs cacheing MD5's of message bodies might be a good idea...

-- 
J C Lawrence                                       claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                          http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--