The lucky for us part is that our major MX servers are pretty beefy. We were able to just modify the access table for postfix and put a drop in place for the offender. After doing that the servers quickly cleared up their queues.
________________________________ From: Peter H. Lemieux [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wed 5/5/2004 1:42 PM To: Gary Smith Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Huge increase in inbound mail the past few days Gary Smith wrote: > There was this hotmail account once that did trigger alerts. There was this > list > moderator for a list that a client was one who used his hotmail account for > administrative purposes. As they some simlpe software for the list there > came a time when there was a problem. An email sent to the list hit his > inbox, which being full generated an NDR to the list which then generated > an NDR to the list which then generated an NDR to the list which then > generated an NDR to the list. Been there, done that, Gary! Even reasonably decent mailing list software like majordomo can encounter these problems when subscribers use badly-configured mail servers or clients. No email server should ever send an NDR to the To or CC field addresses; they should always reply to the Return-Path address which is also usually the Sender. I've had a number of run-ins with stupid "vacation" programs that similarly sent their notices to the list itself rather than to the Sender. It will come as no surprise that a vacation program that brain dead will also fail to track the addresses it has notified so as to limit itself to one notice per sender. So Betty's vacation notifier sends the list her announcement, she receives it as a list message, she notifies the list again, and we're off to the races! After the second time this happened to one of the lists I maintain for a client, I wrote a set of procmail filters to scan each list message for various things like "out.of.the.office" and route them to the list administrator for review. And, of course, every so often I bounce one that begins "Now that I'm no longer out of the office..." :) Peter
