Thanks to everyone who let us know about the "terrance melton carver"
user generating lots of mails to the [email protected] list. We've
stopped the traffic, and we want to apologize.
The mails were the result of a coding error, not a malicious person.
The "terrance" account was designed to silently listen to the mailing
list in order to produce an archive record for markmail.org. The
account was not designed to send email. The only time it is allowed
to send email is to (a) confirm its subscription and (b) confirm its
unsubscription.
What happened this morning is that a regular user sent an email
soliciting an unsubscribe confirmation:
http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=users&msgNo=184018
That message caused the "terrance" account to think it was being asked
to leave the list. So it responded in the affirmative. The account
then saw its own reply, and responded in the affirmative. Repeat.
Repeat. It generated noise like bad microphone feedback, and we're
very sorry.
The "terrance" code is supposed to only respond to "authoritative"
emails -- not emails from regular users, and certainly not messages
from itself. Somehow all these emails today were seen as
"authoritative" and we're working to figure out why.
We've been operating markmail.org for about 10 months now, listening
to and archiving more than 4,000 lists, and this is the first time
anything like this has happened. It's especially disappointing that
it had to happen on one of the most widely subscribed lists and before
you guys had a chance to get to know us. We just started this month
working with Sun and CollabNet to get the OpenOffice lists archived.
Again, we're sorry. The last thing we ever intended was to generate
noise on a list.
-jh-
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