Subject: Ftp-WG: HOT STOCK PICK

From: "Annapurna Lolla" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 20:38:14 -0400

I'm on vacation till 8th of August. You may please contact C Balu
([email-masked]) for any project related issues.

>>> "[email-masked]" 07/27/99 05:59 >>>

In message <[email-masked]>, you write:
>I keep getting this about every minute or so, and the message gets
>longer each time.  It looks to be a really nasty loop somewhere.  Any
>chance someone can stifle it?

>Annapurna Lolla wrote:
..

  This user has a vacation program that sends its auto-replies to the
list
(thanks to the Reply-To, which IMO is a list misconfig) and that doesn't
check
whether it has already sent a reply to the sender and stop. So this is a
nice
positive feedback loop (for added fun, the messages getting looped are
growing
every time).

  I've mailed all the usual contacts at Novell. Several of the messages
bounced; guess they don't bother keeping contacts current. A few more
hit
vacation mailers with no alternate contact. The rest seem to have gone
to
/dev/null. All in all, Novell has made an extremely poor showing of
being able
to handle their users causing trouble on the 'net. If anyone from Novell
is
reading this, it would be nice if you could figure out (a) how to fix
this
ASAP and (b) why mail to your normal contact channels and beyond have
failed to
find someone who can fix the problem in a timely manner.

  So then I mailed the ops/abuse people at BBN (Novell's ISP according
to
RADB). And waited. And nothing. So I called them up. After the usual
questions,
they eventually said they'd try to get in touch with the contacts they
have for
Novell. I suppose there's not a whole lot they can really do. I asked
and was
told that Novell's customer record will have a note made of this
incident.

  Technically speaking, the IETF's open-list policy forbids the list
manager
from blocking this user to solve the problem. Common sense dictates
making a
minor exception and just fixing the problem. Hopefully, the list owner
will
surface.

  I have in general noticed a critical mass of people who are subscribed
to
mailing lists of a technical nature who have massively misconfigured
vacation
programs. There appears to be an education problem here, which might
possibly
fall under the domain of RUN or some other WG.

									-Craig