[14250] in Athena Bugs
Mail Delivery Subsystem: Returned mail: User unknown
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard J. Barbalace)
Sun Mar 10 21:40:28 1996
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 10 Mar 1996 21:40:22 EST
From: "Richard J. Barbalace" <rjbarbal@MIT.EDU>
Hello.
If mail is sent to a list containing a broken address of the form
"STRING:foobar", the mail will bounce and no mail will get sent to any
of the valid addresses on the list. What should happen is that mail
should bounce, but also be delivered to the valid addresses.
An example is the concert-choir list, which has had the following
invalid addresses and has been unuseable for over a week:
% blanche -m concert-choir | grep STRING
STRING:cmsaltzman
STRING:hartweig
STRING:lolaw
STRING:ppflder
STRING:youu
% blanche -m concert-choir |wc
223 223 1892
Although there are over 200 valid addresses on the list, no mail will
get to any of them:
% expn concert-choir
220 MIT.EDU Sendmail 5.61/1.1 (MIT Mailhub) No collect or third-number calls at Sun, 10 Mar 96 20:55:13 EST
250 MIT.EDU Hello tla (TLA.MIT.EDU), pleased to meet you
550 hartweig... User unknown
221 MIT.EDU closing connection
Mail sent to the list will return with a single bounce containing an
error message like this:
------- Forwarded Message
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-DAEMON@tla.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Returned mail: User unknown
The original message was received at Sun, 10 Mar 1996 21:01:33 -0500
from rjbarbal@localhost
----- The following addresses had delivery problems -----
concert-choir (unrecoverable error)
----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to south-station-annex.mit.edu.:
>>> RCPT To:<concert-choir>
<<< 550 hartweig... User unknown: Bad file number
550 concert-choir... User unknown
----- Original message follows -----
.....
------ End Forwarded Message
If someone adds an invalid string to a list using blanche, then
they at least get a warning:
% blanche concert-choir -a "STRING:tgifffff"
WARNING: "STRING:tgifffff" was just added to list "concert-choir".
If concert-choir is a mailing list, this may cause it to stop working.
You should consider removing "STRING:tgifffff" from the list.
However, this really is not sufficient, especially if an unsupervised
script is adding addresses to the list, if the list maintainer is
using a program other than blanche, or if the list maintainer is
as clueless as many list maintainers unfortunately are....
I'll be fixing the concert-choir list in a few minutes, so the above
sample commands shouldn't cause the sample errors. If you'd like to
play around with the problem, however, you can play with the
"conspiracy" list, which is currently a copy of the broken
concert-choir list.
+ Richard
