[Mailman-Users] endlessly repeating posts

[claw at kanga.nu]

On Mon, 18 Jun 2001 13:47:27 -0700 
Elaine Miller <elaine at elainemiller.com> wrote:

> I started a small list, and in its first day (when thankfully we
> had only about ten members) a woman whom I know to be net-savvy
> and who posts without trouble to other (non-Mailman) lists I'm on,
> posted an email that repeated to the general list. And
> repeated. And repeated. And repeated.

You need to examine the Received: headers of several instances of
the repeated post to see exactly where it is getting duplicated.
Without digging out that fact, and other analysis you could do is
largely worthless.

Odd are its not Mailman.  Odds are its one of two places:

  -- The MTA immediately upstream of your hapless poster.

  -- A broken MTA just outside/after your Mailman setup.  It is
  possible (unlikely) its your local MTA.

Read the Received headers.  They'll tell you what's happening.

> I set the other members to NOMAIL immediately, and tried for
> another hour to find a way to stop the echo, (including blocking
> her ISP at the server level) but eventually had to axe the list
> completely.

The odds of it being Mailman (or specifically Mailman's qrunner) are
so low as to be considered zero.  Hunt the MTA chain.  This sort of
thing has happened before to other people.  It has never been
Mailman's fault.  It has ___always___ been the fault of a broken,
misconfigured, braindead (pick any two) MTA which mailman just
happened to reveal.

> I do *not* wish to be lynched by folk who have been mail-bombed!

Then you need to find the correct target.
-- 
J C Lawrence                                       claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                          http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
The pressure to survive and rhetoric may make strange bedfellows