[Mailman-Users] looping

[Chuq Von Rospach]

At 5:38 AM -0400 10/6/00, Yan Seiner wrote:

>As my list consists of people with little to no computer experience, and
>it is meant for broad dissemination of information, I had set the
>"reply-to" to the list.

You just ran into reason #1 why you don't do that. Sorry...

>to a minimum, but I'd like to go back to replying to the list.  Is there
>any way to prevent this?

You can shoot people who use braindamaged vacation bots. if we kill 
enough of them, the rest might get a clue.

But in all seriousness, welcome to one of the great unending battles 
of the list admin. I've been able to minimize the damage by not 
setting reply-to, and by setting my systems to trap as possible spam 
messages which include text in the footer and/or messages which have 
a subject that would be generated by replying to a digest without 
updating the subject line (the "generic subject" problem). I usually 
tweak my message footer to include text that isn't likely to show up 
in a normal message.

it also helps to teach your mailer to trap things like "out of the 
0ffice", "auto-reply" and other key mailbot phrases that you see show 
up, but the more you start building walls, the faster you start 
generating false positives, so there are tradeoffs.

Mailman's a lot less susceptible to this, but coercing reply-to the 
way you did is lighting the fuse. Sorry to hear the fuse was so 
short, but I'm not surprised it happened....

-- 
Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui at plaidworks.com)
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq at apple.com)

You seem a decent fellow. I hate to die.