Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!bionet!agate!shelby!portia!hanauma.stanford.edu!joe
From: joe@hanauma.stanford.edu (Joe Dellinger)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Mailer-daemons mailing to "list servers"
Message-ID: <5290@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 13 Sep 89 08:56:23 GMT
Sender: USENET News System <news@Portia.stanford.edu>
Reply-To: joe@hanauma.stanford.edu (Joe Dellinger)
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Organization: Stanford University, Dept. of Geophysics
Lines: 40


	I maintain a home-brew "list server" on Hanauma. The idea
is that if anybody sends mail to, say, "x@hanauma.stanford.edu",
the mail gets blasted back out to everybody on the list. I couldn't
find any generic UNIX software to do this, so I wrote my own (in csh,
which I can't recommend, because it is VERY inefficient).
	One question was what to do with replies. I have it set up
now so that an "R" reply goes back to the original author, while
an "r" reply goes back to the list server as well, and thence out
to everyone in the list.

	This seems to work fairly well, but I have one big problem.
The list is for technical purposes, and most of the people don't
have e-mail on their machine reliably maintained. On any given posting,
at least 1 or 2 error messages will come back to Hanauma. The exact
messages and the machines they come from seem to be different every time.
The really bad part is the error messages are usually not redirected back
just to the original author, but to the list server itself. This can cause an
infinite loop of blasting out mail to everyone, which of course annoys
the h*** out of everybody.

	Questions:
1) Is there something I'm doing wrong? Is there any way to not have
error messages always go back to the list server address?

2) Is there any standard format for error messages? There doesn't seem
to be; so far I have taken hits from the following daemons:
	Mailer-Daemon
	Mail_System
	uucp
	postmaster
Is there no way of recognizing an error message from legitimate text,
short of AI?

3) Is there any public software package that has solved these problems?

	Thanks!
\    /\    /\    /\/\/\/\/\/\/\.-.-.-.-.......___________
 \  /  \  /  \  /Dept of Geophysics, Stanford University \/\/\.-.-....___
  \/    \/    \/Joe Dellinger joe@hanauma.stanford.edu  apple!hanauma!joe\/\.-._