From: Aaron J. Grier Date: 00:22 on 08 Oct 2005 Subject: broken MTAs the head of marketing (my mother-in-law, unfortunately,) decided to send a newsletter to a few dozen of our international distributors. fine. not a big deal. they actually expect this, are opt-in, and that situation alone is all copacetic. my mother-in-law is (still) not terribly computer-savvy, and put ~80 recipients directly in the To: line. this leaks unnecessary information, but other than being an annoyance is not normally a technical problem. unfortunately one of the recipient's email handlers in sweden apparently has a buffer overflow problem and for whatever reason has decided that it needs to resend this newsletter to all ~80 recipients, I assume since they're on the To: line. it seems to die somewhere in the process, and at last count some recipients had received 20 copies of the newsletter, which included a 88K pdf attachment. this busted swedish mailer is also preserving the original envelope sender, meaning that secondary failures are also being bounced back. hate hate hate.
From: Tannie Date: 18:51 on 08 Oct 2005 Subject: Re: broken MTAs [ Aaron J. Grier - 07/10/2005 16:22 -0700 ]: <snip> > unfortunately one of the recipient's email handlers in sweden apparently > has a buffer overflow problem and for whatever reason has decided that > it needs to resend this newsletter to all ~80 recipients, I assume since > they're on the To: line. it seems to die somewhere in the process, and > at last count some recipients had received 20 copies of the newsletter, > which included a 88K pdf attachment. > > this busted swedish mailer is also preserving the original envelope > sender, meaning that secondary failures are also being bounced back. > > hate hate hate. Ok, going to insert some helpful info here (my deepest apologies for that): This may actually be caused by the wonderful Microsoft POP3 connector in SBS2003 (and in previous versions, but M$ ofcourse doesn't admit that. see: <http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;835734>; ) Due to this mess-up the mailserver pops e-mail, doesn't recognize the to: addresses as 'local' and just resends to all (including self) which cause a nice loop. They do have a patch, and after install the queue needs to be cleaned and the server restarted. The whole thing is very very hatefull, it causes loads of extra work (I work at an isp) and we have around one or two customers per day we phone to explain this problem. I find it extremely hateful that a mailserver that collects mail through pop3 then 'decides' the non-local addresses need to receive this mail again, since the sending server obviously wouldn't do that *roles eyes* cheers,
From: A. Pagaltzis Date: 19:10 on 08 Oct 2005 Subject: Re: broken MTAs * Tannie <tannie@xxxxxxxxxxx.xxx> [2005-10-08 19:55]: > I find it extremely hateful that a mailserver that collects > mail through pop3 then 'decides' the non-local addresses need > to receive this mail again, since the sending server obviously > wouldn't do that *roles eyes* Sounds like the POP3 collector simply feeds the mail into the delivery queue with no indication of where it came from. Not knowing any better, the delivery agent then treats it as it would any other mail it is fully responsible for. The collector was probably just never tested with mails with more than one address in the To: header. This kind of blunder is just mortifying. Programmers/teams without adequate expertise and QA writing networking software intended to run on the open internet should be taken out the back and shot. Regards,
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