At 10:20 -0500 on 03/11/2014, John Gilmore wrote about Re: Automatic reply: AUTO: Umberto Silvestri is prepared fo:
Mark Slater's is the first automatic reply to an automatiic reply that I can remember encountering. It would be easy to imagine a scenario in which such traffic grew exponentially.
I seem to have read of such an event happening years ago with IBM email. Person 1 set their account to send such a automatic reply and so did Person 2. One of them sent a message to the other before going to a conference or something. That message was not accepted (but was queued for a retry) and triggered the auto-reply. Each retry triggered another auto-reply and soon you had retries of original message along with reties of each of the auto-replies from each side. The first retry of the original message was sent along with the auto reply to that initial auto-reply. Each auto-reply cycle doubled the number of in-flight messages.
-- John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
