[Mailman-Developers] problem with list member's vacation script

Barry A. Warsaw barry@python.org
Mon, 14 Oct 2002 20:27:40 -0400


>>>>> "GM" == Gustavo M <linux_news@nextphere.com> writes:

    GM> I manage a mailing list site with mailman, and I recently had
    GM> the following problem:

    GM> Lets say I have a list called test@site.org with 3 members:
    GM> m1@foo.org, m2@foo.org and m3@foo.org. m3 has its vacation
    GM> script turned on. m1 sends an email to test@site.org, so m2,m3
    GM> and m1 itself receive the email. m3's vacation script replies
    GM> to m1 and to test@site.org, so m1 gets 2 copies of the reply
    GM> (one directly and one through test@site.org), m2 gets a copy
    GM> and m1 gets a copy of its own reply which in turn will be
    GM> replied by its vacation script and so on. So my mail server
    GM> ends up sending a lot of useless emails.

And later...
    
    GM> How can I stop this situation? I know I can reject or hold
    GM> emails based on some header pattern matching, but I cannot do
    GM> this on a case by case basis, not all vacation scripts behave
    GM> the same,

And not all are written correctly, sadly.

Vacation programs should ignore all messages with a Precendence
header, with values bulk, list, or junk.  Correctly written vacation
programs will never auto-respond to Mailman messages because Mailman
always send its copies out with such a header.

Vacation programs should never respond to the list address either, nor
should they respond to the same address more than once in a certain
period of time, but broken vacation programs tend to be broken in
multiple ways.

There's no foolproof way to stop a broken vacation program short of
manually unsub'ing the user and sending them a nastygram.  I'm all in
favor of that approach.

That having been said, MM2.1 has some defenses against broken
replybots in general, of which vacation is just a common offender.
However, these defenses help primarily with avoiding reply storms for
Mailman auto-replies.

    GM> so this is not a solution for my problem.  I was thinking
    GM> maybe there's a way to configure mailman so that if m1 sends
    GM> an email to test@site.org mailman will not send a copy of the
    GM> email back to m1 just because m1 is a list member.

While this has nothing to do with broken vacation programs, users can
configure their subscriptions so that they do not receive copies of
their own postings through the list.

    GM> Also, is there a way to limit the number of postings each
    GM> member is allowed to sent per day?

Not currently.  It's on the TODO list for some post-2.1 release.

-Barry