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From: steve@UMIACS.UMD.EDU (Steve D. Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re:  Case of the Replicated Errors: An Internet Postmaster's Horror Story
Message-ID: <9105101244.AA25325@fnord.umiacs.UMD.EDU>
Date: 10 May 91 12:44:05 GMT
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   I had this same sort of error happen to me in the early days (only 500 or
so people on the list, thank goodness) of the Sun-Nets mailing list.  The
resulting errors trashed a VAX 8600 here for twelve hours or so.  In self-
defense, I added a hack to the software I use to run the Sun-Nets list:  it
checks several important header lines to be sure that they aren't too badly
botched, and if it detects an error it bounces the mail to the list
maintainer with a note that says, "the header is messed up, you'd better
take a look at this."  From what Erik said, it sounds like my software would
have kept this problem from happening.  (If someone can give me a copy of
the headers off the original mail, I can check this out.)

   The software also:

	- sets the Sender:  line and the from address in the envelope to say
	something reasonable

	- optionally trims Received:  lines (good for times when a message
	takes 9 hops to come in and another 9 to make it back out, and thus
	would otherwise trigger sendmail's fake-o loop detection)

	- allows an optional header and/or footer to be added to the body of
	the message

	- has some limited smarts (shamelessly borrowed from the mail2news
	program) that attempts to filter out ``please add/delete me'' mail
	mistakenly sent to the list readership rather than to the
	administrivia address.

   I'm sure it's not perfect (the administrivia filter is too trusting, and
in particular doesn't catch LISTSERV stuff), but if you want it, anonymous
FTP out to ftp.umiacs.umd.edu and grab pub/distribute.tar.Z.  The man entry
should be enough to get you started.  Distribute should be fairly portable
(but it will require hacking to be used with something other than sendmail).
If you make changes to this software, I'd be interested in seeing them.

	-Steve

Spoken: Steve Miller    Domain: steve@umiacs.umd.edu    UUCP: uunet!mimsy!steve
Phone: +1-301-405-6736  USPS: UMIACS, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742