joe@hanauma.stanford.edu (Joe Dellinger) (09/13/89)
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\/\.-._
cfe+@andrew.cmu.edu (Craig F. Everhart) (09/15/89)
If you can cause the envelope-from-address in redistributed messages to be the address of the list maintainer at hanauma, you'll both stop the loops and direct redistribution problem reports back to somebody who can fix them. Not knowing anything about your redistribution mechanism, it's hard to say how you'd accomplish this--perhaps the ``-r'' option in sendmail? By ``envelope-from-address'' I mean, in SMTP, the argument of the MAIL FROM: command. Without SMTP, you may wind up having to put this information in the Sender: field or (heaven forbid, for UCB sendmail) an Errors-to: field. Craig Everhart Andrew message system