On Wed, 25 Oct 1995, John Gilmore wrote:
It's true, for a period of about 45 minutes today, someone subscribed the Cypherpunks list to itself. This resulted in a small number of looped messages.
Also in today's bogus news, a rather testy newbie, Arthur Germain, subscribed at 8AM Tuesday. He had unsubscribed by 3PM Tuesday, but when he got another twenty or thirty messages (that had been sent to cypherpunks while he was a subscriber, but which hadn't reached him yet), he forwarded each of them back to the mailing list. You may or may not have seen some of these; I killed off further distribution.
Perhaps we can prevent this sort of thing by putting a signature in each message as majordomo sends it, say some X-Majordomo-Sent-Already header line? Then when majordomo reads an incoming message it would look for that text in both the header and the body, and upon finding it, would discard the message. This would work because removing such a line in order to get majordomo to choke would mean either writing code, or doing it manually. If cypherpunks is subscribed to itself, it's easy for majordomo to not accept cypherpunks@toad.com as a subscriber. But if someone forwards a message or many back to the list, they'd vanish. One of the nicer things about FidoNet (perhaps the only one) is that once a system receives a message, it adds a signature in the hidden area called "seen by" with it's node number. If Majordomo did that, it would know it sent that message already... Not much of a fix, but a nice-to-do kind of fix. :-) ========================================================================== + ^ + | Ray Arachelian | Amerika: The land of the Freeh. | _ |> \|/ |sunder@dorsai.org| Where day by day, yet another | \ | <--+-->| | Constitutional right vanishes. | \| /|\ | Just Say | | <|\ + v + | "No" to the NSA!| Jail the censor, not the author!| <| n ==========================================================================