[comp.sys.dec] Help with mail problem

davida@umd5.umd.edu (David Arnold) (08/07/90)

Well, I tried to get help from the mail group (comp.mail.misc), but
only got one reply which turned out to be a dead end.  Maybe you all
coman help shed some light on my problem.

I'm running a mailing list from my DECstation 3100, running Ultrix 4.0,
and have a problem.  Whenever I send out the list, I almost always get
a second mail item which is a duplicate of the first.  This second mail
item can follow the first by anywhere from  20 minutes to several hours.
It's always just one duplicate item, and it goes to the whole list, not 
just part of it.

The list contains over 300 members; I send mail to an alias which in 
/etc/aliases is an ':include:' of a file containing the list of addresses.
The mail items range between 25K & 50K each.

On odd note:  last week (Tuesday), the person in charge of the basic 
opsys (a server handles 4 of these DECstations) reloaded the system 
from a beta version of 4.0 to the current release of 4.0.  This seemed
to solve the problem for three days, but on the 4th day, the problem
re-emerged, and has been with us ever since.  Over that period, the 
size of the mail items ranged between 25K & 35K.

Since I get the duplicate mailings every time (or almost every time, I'd
say at least 90%), I tend to think it's not a situation of the mailer
dying and re-starting in the middle of the sending.  (This was the sug-
gestion from comp.mail.misc.)  Somebody also mentioned a problem with a
cron bug with their RISC system, but they said it was a locally-created
problem.  

Is anybody else having this problem, or better yet, had & solved it?  Any
help or suggestions are appreciated!  As I'm not a regular reader of these
groups, please send any responses via e-mail.  Also, I'm not exactly a 
guru, so please bear with me...

Thanks in advance,
David Arnold  

Internet: davida@umd5.umd.edu   <--- Preferred
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