People, this argument on whether or not certain people are "guilty" of looping mail or not, and whether or not circumstantial evidence found in looping email can be used to pinpoint the exact culprit, is getting rather ugly, and completely pointless.
A wise man once said that if you never try, you'll never fail. So people who work as system administrators and do sophisticated stuff are bound to mess up once in a while. The more advanced the system administrator, the more spectacular his rare failures can be. If you think this mail loop was bad, you should have seen the mail loop I've caused a few years ago on my own server - that one was a real nuclear-powered mail loop, that took hours of hard work by two people to clean up :) So there is no reason to insult anyone, even if it is his fault, and certainly not if it was never his fault in the first place, like might very well be in this case. Next time such a loop occurs because of problems on the subscribers'-side (not a misconfiguration on the server side), I wholeheartedly request that the mailing list manager try to block out the loop (e.g., by forbidding postings which already have the "X-list: linux-il" header, like I recommended in a previous post) and not let it get out of hand like it did this time. On Fri, Oct 04, 2002, Adir Abraham wrote about "RE: what's going on with the list ?": > On Thu, 3 Oct 2002, guy keren wrote: > Nadav showed me the relevant headers. Except for some mail which was > *sent* to aladdin@junior10, there was nothing there. Then some bouncing > started, in mailgw.technion.ac.il. I find that as a conincidence. Btw - if It might be, but it might not. I don't know. This was just a lead, not evidence for a court of law. The fact that the bounced mail (many of them, actually) was carrying that aladdin@junior10 email on it, was conclusive evidence that the mail started looping on its way to this specific person. It doesn't mean that this person did something wrong - it could be any mail server between them, including the technion's mail exchanger, mailgw. > some mail got out of junior10 - before it reached mailgw, it would pass > through junior10 (out of it, not for it). I haven't seen that happening > either. Btw, in addition to mailgw, I see there another host (ask Nadav > for the logs he sent me). I won't mention it in here since I don't want to > make it look like I am trying to find some guilty person as well. I hope you don't mean the math.technion.ac.il host, which was simply the final destination of that mail... I want to make it clear again, that I was never trying to get the guilty person hung. By the time I sent that lead, this loop problem had been going on for over 24 hours, so I wanted it to end. One way to end it is to add filters on the server, and I explained how to do it, but it wasn't done. So the other way was to mention an email address that suspiciously appeared on many of the looping messages, hoping that this person would check out if he didn't change anything in his configuration lately (it's easy to mess up a procmail configuration file...). I didn't think that merely saying that "perhaps" someone was involved was going to get him publicly stoned. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. -- Nadav Har'El | Friday, Oct 4 2002, 28 Tishri 5763 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Strike not only while the iron is hot, http://nadav.harel.org.il |make the iron hot by striking it. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
