vacation programs

CNI-COPYRIGHT subscribers,

This is just a reminder...

During the summer months, if you are going on vacation, I would recommend that you issue the command to set your mail delivery to POSTPONE. Please issue this command before you turn on any vacation notification feature in your mail user agent.

You can do so by sending this command (as an e-mail note) to the address <listproc[_at_]cni.org>

   SET CNI-COPYRIGHT MAIL POSTPONE As far as vacation notification programs are concerned... I would strongly recommend against using them, especially in conjunction with mailing lists. If you are going to use such a program, please make sure you understand how it works before turing it on and test it early for problems, if possible.

Over the past week, four different CNI-COPYRIGHT subscribers have caused infinite mailing loops (where the notification messages coming out of the list/list management software cause a user's mail system to mail multiple copies of the vacation notice back) by turning on a vacation notification program and then leaving for vacation.

In the worst of these recent cases, one subscriber issued the command to SET POSTPONE *after* the vacation program was enabled. Unfortunately, the command was issued late on Thursday July 1 and caused a loop which ran unchecked until the evening of Monday July 5. There were something on the order of 10,000 error messages from our ListProcessor queued at the point I discovered the problem... and it forced me to shut down our ListProcessor for several hours on Monday evening while I cleaned up the mess and re-configured the ListProcessor to ignore future notifications messages from said user.

Thanks for your time and consideration of this matter.

-- 

                         Craig A. Summerhill
    Coalition Manager o'Lists -- The Postmaster -- listmgr[_at_]cni.org
    Coalition for Networked Information; 21 Dupont Circle, N.W., 
    Suite 800; Washington, D.C.   20036   listmgr[_at_]cni.org (Postmaster)