From: Ray Arachelian <sunder@amanda.dorsai.org>
Date: Thu, 2 Nov 1995 02:29:09 +0800
To: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] Re: Welcome to cypherpunks
In-Reply-To: <9510260118.AA07260@toad.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.951101122248.25318F-100000@amanda.dorsai.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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
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