Bon Matin,
 
This is for LISTSERV programming staff and had happened on BLUES-L last
summer.
 
A DIGEST user go on vacation. He sets up ".vacation" file (or equivalent
on his O/S) with the "quote original" message on. In his eagerness to
get away having summer fun. He forgets to go NOMAIL.
 
The auto answer goes out. Nobody notice since it does happen that people
replying to a DIGEST forget to edit the subject line. Re:DIGEST-1 goes
out on the list as aimple message. Since the sender is This-Guy and the
list is public. The next day ditto with DIGEST-2 that becomes
Re:DIGEST-2 that contains (re:DIGEST-1, that is in fact the day before
digest). DIGEST is usually around 100-120Kb . At the end of the week we
have a DIGEST send to every one that is over 2MB ... Reminds me of the
Tower of Hanoi algorithm and the effect on the list community can be
imaged to the bombimg of Hanoi itself...
 
[(n-1)!*size or something like that will lead to believe that a 14 days
vacation would have given a last day DIGEST of 622MB+100kB for the
current day traffic, but at this point hey! who would care about it).]
I would believe that a SysOp would have picked it up at one point
noticing a job hogging all the free disk space...
 
We all believed that someone got through to make him NOMAIL. I now
wonder if that is not system staff or even the *mysterious* LISTSERV
spam filter or some other LISTSERV built-in feature that stopped it. It
happened when the sole-owner was himself away on vacation. I know he
should have caught it right away.
 
My question is: Is it still possible with later than 1.8b version ?
 
Worst case scenario is a list-owner with limited diskspace or diskquota.
Since he can no further be notified, he cannot intervein. So it can
happen even if someone *is* monitoring the list.
 
I do believe it is hard to catach if the quoting is ">Sender: BLUES-L"
since that is not picked up by the mail loop check, or so I've been
told.
 
Am I correct in asserting that about the only way to avoid it, would be
for LISTSERV to check invidual post for occurences of the yesterday
DIGEST header ... Now I never been subbed DIGEST so I don't know if the
"day" is LIST or user specific (related to date/time command was sent).
It would only be feasible if every one receive the same 24 hours DIGEST.
Simpler yet would be defaulting Sizelim= to some value...
 
Is it already on a wish list for later version ? Or is it considered
such a low possibility threat that is left to list-owner to catch if it
happens ? In that case, that is a stronger argument for co-ownership.
I do think that a Sizelim= default to be increased if needed is the best
way to go.
 
PS When we were fantasizing about shredding the guy's legs and sitting
him in a red ants colony in the desert sun ... Some talked about
unsubbing the guy and I suggested a formal message stating that "The
BLUES-L advisory board named him list-owner"... After reading his mail,
he unsubed... Poor guy! He was careless, so was the list-owner but
still, I've read some of the post that was CC'ed to him... Brrrr!...
Well, he is problably out of therapy now ... :-))
 
--
Eric Paul-Hus, BLUES-L