[Mailman-Users] Vacation email loop

[Marc MERLIN]

On Fri, Nov 02, 2001 at 05:22:53PM -0500, Clark Cooper wrote:
> I had a situation where a user on one of my lists had the vacation utility
> turned on and a posting to the list resulted in a looped email because the
> vacation email response was then posted and on and on.  The reply-to posts
> option has been set to "the list" and I would like to keep this setting.  Is

I take it, you've already read the pro (no 's') and cons
http://marc.merlins.org/netrants/listreplyto.html

> there any setting that can be changed to keep this from happening?  I can

Outside of removing the reply to, which will catch many but not all of those
problems, my usual answer is to blackhole the server the Emails came from,
and send the following to the postmaster:
http://marc.merlins.org/netrants/autoresponders.txt

Broken autoresponders should not be tolerated.

> not always depend on the user disabling their account on the list server.  I
> need a way for the list server to recoginize this looping is happening and
> take action.

considering  that  many  of  those broken  autoresponders  don't  quote  the
original message, or use headers like in-reply-to and so forth, it's hard.
The only  thing that would  always work would be  to throttle the  number of
messages per user per unit of time  and disable anyone who posts more than 5
times a minute let's say.

Marc
-- 
Microsoft is to operating systems & security ....
                                      .... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
  
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