Looping E-mails Beat The Net Down

Staili writes "Singapore-based women's magazine caused problems when it forwarded its mails to a large list of recipients, mainly mailing lists. In addition to [e-mail], some help and subscribe lists were included; the type of addresses that tend to send out an automatic reply confirming receipt. And the loop was ready." I'm sure anyone who's messed with mail enough has accidentally created a loop or two in their day, but this is really slimey.

Normal

[dnoyeb]

This happens at my job all the time, and I assume it happens other places with internal mail servers.

Management sends out a promotion announcement or some such to everyone, those on vacation autoreply...To ALL recepients. And the war is on!

I think enough people slapped management that they finally started using BCC. But sometimes someone new comes and they forget.

Outlook...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the classic Outlook 'Out of Office' Autoreply springs to mind - great when the recipient is on a mailing list, it replies... posts itself... replies... etc...

This has happened 4 or 5 times to me in teh last few weeks...

Re:Asia Problem

[mccalli]

Is it really time to consider the firewalling of certain asian email...

Right, well I've been to Singapore and I have to tell you that its IT and communications are in a very good state. In fact, I'm rather hoping someone actually from Singapore will chip in here

Singapore was the first place I saw ADSL in. It has a row of internet 'phone' booths on its most popular shopping street (Orchard Road). In my hotel, 24 internet access was available for a ridiculously low fee (12 SGD I think). It was cheaper for me to phone the UK from my my hotel than it was for a person in the UK to phone me. Cheaper from a hotel phone.

There seems to be some insidious 'oh, it's those clueless Asians' thread running through so many Slashdot posts recently that I think it's time the balance was addressed. The US's mobile phone system, for example, is an utter shambles compared to the Asian systems. I was reading on a UK's paper site that BT was planning to roll out the world's first internet booths - I was reading it from an internet booth in Singapore.

I can assure everyone that the people I worked with in Singapore were quite bright enough to run systems properly, and every bit as interested as their Western equivalents in doing so.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Why was the header stripped...

[Corgha]

Somehow, few people seem to be able to get the autoresponder/autoforwarder thing right, despite the fact that it doesn't seem that hard and has been done correctly before. (Then again, there seems to be a dearth of good systems programmers around these days; I'm becoming increasingly cynical about such things.) Every day, I get auto-replies to MAILER-DAEMON's bounce messages, and every once in a while, some b0rken forwarder creates a mail loop. Unfortunately, when I try to tell the people responsible why what they are doing is a bad idea, they're usually not interested in hearing about the danger of mail loops.

Here are some things I've come up with over the years:
1) Never, ever auto-reply to MAILER-DAEMON or Postmaster (procmail has good regex macros for this -- use them or copy them).

2) Preserve the headers of messages you forward.

3) Set an X-Loop header and check for it (or *any* X-Loop header if you want to be paranoid).

4) Don't autoreply to the same address twice during [definable time period].

Those things just seem like common sense to me. Maybe someone else here knows more about the subject than I do. There has to be a HOWTO somewhere.

Re:Asia Problem

[Genie1]

It has a row of internet 'phone' booths on its most popular shopping street (Orchard Road)

I am not a Singaporean but I stay here. These internet 'phone' booths are not working. I believe that the plan is to implement them later on, but not yet. Right now, it is just a couple of information kiosks.

I do agree that the infrastructure in Singapore is really really good. There are a few broadband plans going for about $60-70 Singapore dollars a month. That is about $30 USD. Plus the all the service is linked to a national high speed network.

Plus, corruption in this Asian nation is almost non-existent. Bloody incredible.

MS Exchange 2000 "Out of the office agent" problem

[forged]

A large corporation I am affiliated with, has recently moved 1000's employees from a perfectly working unix-based mail system, to MS Exchange 2000 for political reasons more than technical.

One of the 'Features' we discovered in E2K, is that whenever one emails a mailing list and that some people on this list have activated the out of the office agent ("OOA"), a reply from each one of these people is generated, even though none of these recipients were in To: or CC: field in the first place. Microsoft has yet to produce a fix, if ever.

This is a devious method for finding out who's on vacation and who isn't, but the side effect (when one doesn't understand what's happening) is surprising to say the least, and all of this is unsollicited email (spam).

Some good pointers to the OOA debate:
A. http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/ietf/Current/msg 12543.html [ietf.org]
Q. http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/ietf/Current/msg 12544.html [ietf.org]

Unfortunately, there was no further follow-up on this last question.

Also, from http://www.slipstick.com/rules/autoreply.htm [slipstick.com] :

"If you are using OOA, be sure to keep a list of all the mailing lists you have subscribed to, so that you can either unsubscribe or change your list settings so that you receive no message from the list while you have OOA turned on. It's rude to send OOA messages to mailing lists."

From the above text, their workaround is to unsubscribe from any mailing lists you may be subscribed to when turning on the OOA. This doesn't scale when the company has got 30,000+ roaming workers making extensive use of the OOA, when each worker must unsubscribe/resubscribe to 10's of mailing lists each time (would _you_ do it ?).

Their sentence ``It's rude to send OOA messages to mailing lists.'' perfectly summarizes what this is all about, and how certain problems are generated in the first place.

I rest my case. Thank you for reading this far.