At 07:54 AM 11/16/02, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:
Hello Ed,
> In any case, mailman does have options to detect infinite loops like
> this but even the current production releases miss a few. In the beta
> releases, the detection is supposed to be better and more cases will be
> caught.
Could you maybe explain how this would be implemented? A mailing list is
based on the principle that everybody can reply to any message, so every reply
is a reply to a message that has "been there". Loop control is usually based
on the principle that you don't reply to a reply to a message you sent by
setting and checking a flag, but I don't see how that could be implemented
here.
Bye,
Leonard.
Loop detection and out-of-office are two completely different problems. I remember one email address that would simply redirect all email back to sender; which made it act like the mailing list was subscribed to itself - very nasty - that's what loop detection is for. To detect loops, an additional header is added to all outgoing messages, like:
X-Loop: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Then the mailing list software rejects all incoming messages with this header.
I don't know how mailman attempts to handle out-of-office, but majordomo simply scans the message headers for regex specified in config file. An entry something like
/^subject:\s*out of office\b/i
should have stopped this mess before it started.
Frank
