[Mailman-Users] mail loops: list-request and vacation messages

[Amanda]

Chuq Von Rospach wrote:

> Did the guy who set up the mailbot give mailman any way of telling this
> was a mailbot, or a loop? Did they include any keywords, like "out of
> the office" or "vacation" or "I am an idiot who's mailbot is going to
> make you crazy now"?
> [snip]
> If you can find something the mailbot did that (a) would allow mailman
> to recognize it as such, and (b) wouldn't cause false positives by
> blocking legitimate messages, let us know. We'll look at improving
> mailman to trap it. But the blatting mailbot is the problem -- it's
> ignoring ALL of the things Mailman's done all along to tell the mailbot
> to leave it alone and not bother telling us about the vacation; worse;
> that vacation bot isn't smart enough to know it's already told us -- it
> must think we're really stupid to have to tell us repeatedly....

The problem with this is (and boy, howdy, lemme tell ya)... there's always
one turkey who has to do something weird with his vacation message. I now
have a filter that reads something like this: "If this text appears in the
subject or body of the message, send it to the trash mailbox: out of the
office; out of office; out of town; out-of-town; away from the office; away
from my office; away from my desk, away from my email; away from my mail;
unavailable to respond to email; unavailable to email; unable to receive
email; away from the hospital; out of the country; on sabbatical; attending
a seminar; automated response; automatic response; automated responder;
automatic responder; autoresponse; auto-response; auto-reply; automatic
reply; unattended mailbox..."

Yesterday one stupid user blew another hole in my filtering: Her away
message read "away fromthe office". As we send daily messages, and she's
going to be away fromthe office for more than a month, I went ahead and
added her typoed message to my filtering.

Today another one did it to me - his message was "Land ho! We're on an
island-hopping pleasure cruise until mid-July. Don't wait on the pier for
us!"

Filter that. <shaking head>

Forty thousand users who are too clever for their own damned good. There are

moments that I hate every single one of them, individually and with
heartfelt passion. This afternoon happens to be one of those moments.

=)
Amanda





Chuq Von Rospach wrote:

> On Monday, June 25, 2001, at 11:02 AM, Gunnar Evermann wrote:
>
> > Some guy send a request to list-request and left for holidays
> > activating some stupid vacation feature in his Mailer (Outlook). When
> > Mailman replied to the request message Outlook sent back not one but
> > two vacation messages [1] back to list-request.
>
> > It would be nice if Mailman was more resistant to these mail loops
> > [2].
>
> Suggestions on how?
>
> the mailbot that guy used was seriously broken and non-conforming. It
> ignores Precedence headers, which are there (in part) to tell mailbots
> NOT to mailbot a message in the first place, and it's not smart enough
> to not repeatedly mailbot a single address. Both of those are basic,
> trivial functionality ANY mailbot ought to have -- and many of them have
> had for 15 years or more. It's sad there are still people who think they
> can write softwrae that are so uninformed about stuff they're writing,
> but that's a different argument.
>
> Did the guy who set up the mailbot give mailman any way of telling this
> was a mailbot, or a loop? Did they include any keywords, like "out of
> the office" or "vacation" or "I am an idiot who's mailbot is going to
> make you crazy now"?
>
> Unnfortunately, there's a basic reality here -- no matter how smart you
> make mailman, one stupid mailbot can sidetrack everytihng you can do to
> stop it. Can Mailman get better? sure. what can't? But until people find
> ways to make it better, it's hard.
>
> What did this mailbot do that an automated systems like Mailman
> recognize it?
>
> These mailbot loops are the bane of administrators, especially since the
> worst ones are usually started on Friday afternoon before a 3 day
> weekend, because the worst of the vacation bots are set up at the last
> minute by someone primarily interested in LEAVING, not making the
> mailbot work, and otherwise aren't configured, tested or monitored --
> and the admin is likely gone and doesn't know until he comes back after
> the weekend that the mailbot's been sending 2000 messages an hour. And
> the idiot who sets the mailbot up blames you, of course...
>
> If you can find something the mailbot did that (a) would allow mailman
> to recognize it as such, and (b) wouldn't cause false positives by
> blocking legitimate messages, let us know. We'll look at improving
> mailman to trap it. But the blatting mailbot is the problem -- it's
> ignoring ALL of the things Mailman's done all along to tell the mailbot
> to leave it alone and not bother telling us about the vacation; worse;
> that vacation bot isn't smart enough to know it's already told us -- it
> must think we're really stupid to have to tell us repeatedly....
>
> --
> Chuq Von Rospach, Internet Gnome <http://www.chuqui.com>
> [<chuqui at plaidworks.com> = <me at chuqui.com> = <chuq at apple.com>]
> Yes, yes, I've finally finished my home page. Lucky you.
>
> Some days you're the dog, some days you're the hydrant.
>
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