[ale] mail loops

Sean drifter at oppositelock.org
Fri Apr 18 16:41:55 EDT 2008


Odd problem.  The account I use for Ale and some other groups 
(oppositelock.org) is maintained by my son.  Earlier today a spammer
sent me an email with one of the common viri attached. The mail
server dutifully tagged the message as infected spam and sent it
along to my Speakeasy account, where Speakeasy saw the virus and
bounced it back to oppositelock,org. Then the two mail servers played
badmitten with the message until it had ballooned to 1.9 Mgb in
a seemingly infinite mail loop.  At one point the many copies of this thing
had nearly filled up my allocated disk space at Speakeasy.  I'm not sure
how big that is, but I've never been above 15-20% before -- and that only
after being away from a computer for two weeks or more.

Short term solution at oppositelock is to drop all "bounced" messages into
/dev/null, but what might be a better solution for cutting this kind of 
recursive mail loop?

Sean



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