Greetings!

Something strange happen on my mail list this past week.

Postings  on the mail list were repeating and repeating and repeating.

There was a counter at the end of these messages that appears as a series of
periods.  The first repeated message was posted there is a single period.  The
next time there is a line with two periods that precedes the line with one
period.  Each repeat adds a new line with one more period in it.

The messages looked like this at the end:

First repeat
.

Next repeat
..
.

Next repeat
...
..
.

and so on.

What concerns me is that I can not figure out how this could have happen due to
a simple system problem. If there was a loop on the host system at
American.edu, then I would have expected to see the same line appended to all
the messages over and over again. In order to see three periods, followed by
two periods followed by one period, a program would have had to to read the
text of the message,  found the line with a period or a series of periods,
inserted a new line with an additional period and sent the message back to the
list server.

This can not be explained by a simple case of the list server re-reading the
inbound queue over and over again.

I recall that there are some simple e-mail clients where you type in a message
and ended the message with a single period.

What really bothers me is that by adding these series of periods to the end of
a message, it defeats the listsever's ablitiy to detect duplicate messages.

Has anyone else seen this happen on their mailing lists?

Cheers!

J. Michael Morrill
DB2-L ListOwner