If a user submits a subscription request where the name does not include a fully-qualified domain name, then everything blows up hard.
Mailman fails to recognize the bounce properly, attempts to parse it, fails, sends a response, that bounces, it parses, it replies... BLAM. Your machine's load average skyrockets and your mail queue starts to explode.
Even worse is that it doesn't terminate. I had to shut down the sendmail listener, clean the mail queue, and clear mailman's pending mail queue. You also have to watch out from cron in case it tells mailman to process its queue :-).
Back in August, this bug took out my system (had to reset and cold boot). Happened again today, but I was able to catch it after about 15 minutes of grinding. I've also since adjusted my since to queue at a lower load average (so that I can actually get a time slice and some virtual mem while I correct the problem).
Is there a tweak that I can apply to the bounce detection to fix the loop?
thx -g
-- Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/