In message <96Nov8.085410gmt+0200.20740@city.durban.gov.za>, Rob BRUCE-BRAND wr
ites:
>Have you chaps ever experienced this fiasco:

. . . snip

>What happens? He
>gets an e-mail from a mail listing. His mail system automatically
>sends an e-mail to the whole group saying that he's on leave. Now the
>'whole group' includes him, so he also receives this message.

. . . snip

        Ah, the law of unintended consequences.  The vacation program
should keep a list of every address it has sent the answering machine
message to and never ever do it more than once.  I think some mailers can even
be forced not to reply to designated addresses for precisely the reason
you succinctly described.

        After that, one gets in to the world of heuristics and rules on both
the mailer and list mailer's sides and all kinds of fun things can happen
so the best idea is to keep things as simple as possible.  The best example
of how rules go wrong is that message we all get from time to time from the
PICLIST  stating that the message we just sent was a duplicate.  That is a
safety measure which, when it works, will stop exactly the kind of loop
described.  When it doesn't, we have a mess.  One rule of thumb I have heard
which makes lots of sense is to never generate error messages from other
error messages, (a bounce message to a full mailbox) for instance.

        I  know this is totally off topic and not particularly interesting to
many, but keeping the mailer running right is like taking out the trash
and cutting the grass;  not very exciting, but necessary.

Martin McCormick 405 744-7572   Stillwater, OK
OSU Center for Computing and Information services Data Communications Group