On Mon, 25 Oct 1999, Heidi Harendza wrote:

> The thing that's cracking me up is that, in writing to the list to stop the
> madness, they are causing more spam.
>
> Would someone kindly give a shout when the list owner fixes the problem over
> there, so that I can re-sub when all the chaos has ended?

This screwup is awe-inspiring.  These things don't just happen at random.
It requireed a badly-configured mail server in the Delaware state
government that sends error messages in response to error messages.  It
also required a badly-configured listserv that blithely passes error
messages to the whole list.  Quite possibly, the error messages themselves
are configured in a nonstandard way so that they bypass the usual
screening; if that's the case, the fault also lies in Delaware.

Don't blame the poor folks whose mailboxes filled up -- blame the supposed
computer professional who set up the system, presumably under some kind of
lucrative state contract.

Since every message to PL generates an automated error message from the
idiot server in Delaware, every cry of anguish only fuels the flames.  And
pretty soon, a second mailbox on that same server got filled up, and so
every message to PL generated TWO automated error messages.

Note, please, that Delaware is not the only place where mailboxes are
filled to overflowing.  And yet Delaware is the only server which is
flooding us with error messages.  Most of our mail servers are not so
dysfunctional.

What has saved us here from even graver problems is the slowness of the
Delaware server combined with the slowness of the PL listserver.  Imagine
how fast an infinite loop could pile up error messages at the speed of
light!

Like the doughty coastal homeowners who choose to hunker down and ride out
the hurricane, I have declined to evacuate; I remain on PL.  I lost count
of how many hundreds of error messages have flooded through the list.

It's funny in a way, but it's also doing grave damage to Preservation-L.
Most of the people driven out by the flood will not be back, I suspect.
By being in the right place at the rght time, PL assembled a lot of
highly knowledgeable preservation professionals and made them at least
somewhat accessible through the list for random queries.  Unfortunately,
I'm sure many of them have limited Internet skills or patience for this
kind of problem.  This delicate ecology is undoubtedly taking a huge hit.

---
Lawrence Kestenbaum, [log in to unmask]
The Political Graveyard, http://politicalgraveyard.com