Receiving a lot of double messages.

[Deborah Swanson]

Grant Edwards wrote, on January 06, 2017 1:56 PM
> 
> On 2017-01-05, Antoon Pardon <antoon.pardon at rece.vub.ac.be> wrote:
> 
> > Is there something going on with the mailinglist? Because I have 
> > receive a lot
> > of double messages. One copy is fairly normal and is part 
> of the discussion 
> > thread, the other is completely seperated. -- Antoon Pardon.
> 
> Yep, there are a _lot_ of duplicate messages showing up on 
> gmane's NNTP server.  I would guess around 50-100 of them in 
> the past day. Entire chunks of long threads comprising 20-30 
> posts seem to be duplicated in some cases.  In other cases, 
> they're just individual posts that seem to be detached from 
> their original threads.
> 
> Something is seriously broken somewhere...
> 
> -- 
> Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! I 
> want a VEGETARIAN
>                                   at               BURRITO to 
> go ... with
>                               gmail.com            EXTRA MSG!!

162 duplicate messages, as of 2:04 PM PST today, to be precise. This
same thing happened when I was on the Exchange team at Microsoft, but
that was on a pre-release dogfood mail server, not even a beta for a
pre-release. Good thing it was only in-house Microsofties who had to
field the thousands of garbage messages when that happened.

The problem then was that they had to flush the mail queue that had
become clogged up with duplicate messages because some bit of code had
looped back on itself. 

Granted, the list mail server probably isn't an enterprise version, with
mail replicating between hundreds of servers, but as Chris mentioned, it
does take a feed from the newsgroup, and there's plenty of room for that
to break. Quite likely the fix for any mail server whose mail queue has
been corrupted is to flush it.