Here is what happened on the IRLEARN loop problem... Niall had set his INFO-
VAX list to "Send= Editor" (ie moderated list) with "Editor= [log in to unmask]
ARPA". When you set "Send= Editor" and "Editor= ed1,ed2,...", any of the people
listed in the "Editor=" keyword can mail directly to the list while mail from
any other network address is transferred to "ed1", the "main editor". In other
words, "ed1" is the list moderator while "ed2,ed3..." are "trusted" people from
which mail should always be accepted without being first submitted to the list
moderator.
With "Editor= INFO-VAX@...", everything sent to INFO-VAX@IRLEARN was forwar-
ded to the master list on ARPAland, except if it came from the master list it-
self. At least, that's how Niall thought it would have worked.
Unfortunately mail from ARPA lists does not have the list-userid as "From:"
nor "Sender:". It is usually in the "To:" field, although I have seen some
pieces of ARPA mail *without* a "To:". Since the "Editor" feature was NOT desi-
gned to operate as an automatic-forwarder process for hierarchically linked
lists, it looks at the (Resent-)"From:" and "Sender:" tags to determine from
whom the piece of mail came. The "To:" field is assumed to be the list address,
ie INFO-VAX@IRLEARN in our case. I personally do not see anything wrong with
that, nor do I see any reason why it should be changed to operate differently.
Another problem was that the process of resending a file to the editor is
done via a "SENDFILE"-like process, ie as a file, not through the MAILER. The
reason for that is that it is not yet possible to use BSMTP to resend the
mailfile 'as is' to the editor (if the destination mailer uses BITNET 2 and
gets a BSMTP-sent mail with a wrong "To:" header, it will not be distributed
properly) and I did not want to add "Resent-" tags since there could have been
"Resent-" tags in the original piece of mail and these would need to be preser-
ved (otherwise the editor would not know the origin of the mailfile). Granted,
I could have changed the "To:" or "Resent-To:" field to point to the editor's
mailbox, but then he would not have known any more to which list the mail was
aimed. I would have had to add a line of "Comment: This mailfile was originally
sent to list XXXXXX", which would then have appeared on the header of the mail-
file when (and if) the editor decides to resend the mailfile to the list.
Anyway, the process currently assumed the editor was a BITNET person. The
idea behind this is that if a BITNET list must be editored by an ARPA-man, it
would be much easier to send to the ARPA-list directly and have the editor
submit to the BITNET list with "Send= Owner". The "Internal error" reported by
LISTSERV was due to the mail-routine which improperly considered the informati-
ve return code "Note: your file was sent through the mailer because SENDFILE
could not be used" as an error because it didn't expect ARPA userids. There
had been no internal error at all, and the file-sending routine had generated a
mail envelope to send the "file" to the ARPA recipient -- hence the subject of
File "xxx xxxx" being sent to you.
That's what I wanted to say. I'd like to add that FRECP11-LISTSERV has a
built-in routine that automatically detects rejection mail of (nearly) any kind
being sent to it. The BITNIC-type servers take steps to have rejection mail
sent to another userid (and this has unpleasant side effects on the MAILBOOK
software package, but let's not start a polemics about this again); however if
it receives a rejection mail from a mailer which does not fully respect RFC822
it gets into a mailing loop (remember the one on EARNTECH just before CEARN
installed FRECP11-LISTSERV?). Should my software be blamed for the INFO-VAX
loop? I don't think so. If someone sets a list pointing to itself using BITNIC-
LISTSERV and generates a huge loop, I guess he would be held responsible for it
(don't laugh, this has already happened with one of the FRECP11-LISTSERVs, but
hopefully FRECP11-LISTSERV does not enter a loop when a list points to itself).
Regards,
Eric
PS: I am not on the MAIL-L list. Please send replies directly to me. To avoid
further protestations: I did not set a "Reply-To:" tag pointing to me in
this piece of mail since the BITNIC server would discard it anyway.
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