Hello Listserv Gurus;

A very strange situation happened this afternoon. I discovered that an
owner of one of the lists on listserv.temple.edu had configured his list's
header with "Errors-To= None". This list had one primary owner and five
quiet owners. This list was also configured for "Send= Private" so anyone
who is subscribed can post to the list.

The owner of the list then got the bright idea (without consulting with
anyone) to quiet add some 7100 people to his list. Of those 7100
subscriptions, 5,785 had an invalid address.  The problem was that these
5,875 subscriptions all had the wrong userid on them, but pointed to
astro.temple.edu which is the central email server for our university.

Then after the list was populated with those subscriptions, some messages
were sent to the list. A few wayward subscribers (who's addresses were
correct) wrote back to the list to ask to be removed from this list. These
requests were then distributed back to the list.

As far as I can tell, this activity started at 10:30 Monday night. It
seems to have created a cascading effect where, by the time this afternoon
rolled around, our qmail software ended up with nearly 40,000 errant
messages bound for the system astro.temple.edu which is where the errant
addresses pointed to and all the owners of that list. Since astro's
sendmail is sometimes very slow to distribute email for its 40,000 users,
the number of messages in its Listserv mail queue (we have a separate mail
queue on our Listserv just for astro)  slowly began to grow this morning.
Nothing looked wrong yesterday on our Listserv. The level of pending
messages was normal.

I have the problem fixed now, but I am really curious about where all
those error messages went. A few of the messages went to the quiet owners
(which is what brought this to my attention), but only a few. About two
hours ago, I reconfigured that list to have errors sent to an address I
use on a system other than Astro and I set the list to be edited by me,
but thus far, I have received only a handful of rejected messages. If you
have any ideas on where these thousands of error message bounces went (or
are going), please let me know.