On Thu, 18 Aug 1994 10:36:20 EDT Marc Abrahams <[log in to unmask]> said:
 
>What simple precaution  can I, as a  list owner, take to  try to prevent
>this kind of problem from recurring.
 
Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to your question. If there were,
it would be built in to the code and the problem wouldn't exist. In fact,
LISTSERV has  a very sophisticated  loop detector without which  you'd be
seeing a LOT more of these problems.
 
Prior to  version 1.7f, there  was one loop  "filter" for all  the lists,
which was  drastic and unforgiving.  Some people complained  that userids
such as POSTMASTER  or root were not able to  subscribe to mailing lists,
which  was a  problem because  on many  single-user unix  systems, people
normally work as root. With version  1.7f, you have two filters, a "safe"
one which is the same as the old one, and a new, more tolerant one, which
lets POSTMASTER and root talk to  LISTSERV and post to lists. The default
is to use the safe filter when the  list has a return address of the form
listname@nodeid,  and  the   new  filter  when  the   return  address  is
[log in to unmask] Finally, the default  is to use the owner-listname
form of return address. So, by default you have the weak filter.
 
I have  since then put POSTMASTER@*  back into the weak  filter, since it
turned out that there are a lot of systems that ignore the return address
and send delivery errors from POSTMASTER. Anyway, you can enable the safe
filter by adding:
 
* Filter= Safe
 
to the list header.
 
  Eric