[Mailman-Developers] routing loop circuit breakers

[Roy Smith]

We just had a mail routing loop disaster on one of our mailing lists (not
run with mailmail).  A list subscriber had a mis-behaved vacation responder
which flooded the list with about 100 copies of a vacation message in the
course of a couple of hours before it got noticed.  You can imagine the
mess this caused.

Does mailman have any soft of circuit breaker to prevent something like
this?  If so, it would probably be the incentive we need to change from
majordomo to mailman.  I guess the right heuristic to have prevented this
would be something like refusing mail from anybody if they have sent more
than N messages in X minutes.  I could even imagine a fast-blow and
slow-blow threshold, i.e. "5 messages in 10 minutes or 20 messages in 24
hours" type of thing.  Is this possible?

Roy Smith <roy@popmail.med.nyu.edu>
New York University School of Medicine
550 First Avenue, New York, NY  10016