On 12 Feb 2002 at 13:52, Jean Snow wrote, in part:
> I just got off the phone with the sysadmins at what I'm calling
> 'unhappyplace.org'.  They were unhappy because they had 80K messages in
> their queues for a user, whose vacation program got into an email loop with
> Listserv.  We discussed vacation rules they might use (they use Groupwise,
> which I'm pleased to say I know nothing about) to prevent this from
> happening again.
>
> The reason I'm writing is that I'd have expected listserv to have said
> 'Unknown command ... try HELP' fifty or so times and then to have served off
> the user before much damage was done.
>
> Instead, it said:
> 8 Feb 2002 06:45:51 -> Rejected:
> * Your message is being returned to you unprocessed because no command was *
> found in the message body. LISTSERV  expects commands in the body of the *
> message, rather than in the message  subject, because some users have no *
> control over the contents of the "Subject:" field on outgoing messages. 8
> Feb 2002 06:45:51 Sent information mail to [log in to unmask]

We had a loop yesterday with a "FirstClass" user and LISTSERV giving out
this "no command in body" rebuke.  The user was not using a vacation
message (according to FirstClass help-desk personnel), but had sent an
empty note to an address that was resent to a list.

After filtering the user address in go.user, I was a bit disappointed that
we were "only" bouncing back 1/second ;-)   Then I realized the
"bottleneck" was at the other end.

Is the empty message reply uncapped?   cheers, wayne


Wayne T. Smith                         Systems Group - UNET
[log in to unmask]                 University of Maine System