Having fun in KY, wish you were here

[Jim Carson]

[[ This fiasco (as far as I know) only effected Bitnet readers.  But an
explanantion is in order.  --wnl ]]

Hello,
Aaron Konstam asks:
> Why did I get 48 copies of this message. A. Konstam

Good question.  Here is an explanation of why you got >40 copies of my 
vacation message:

----------Forwarded message:
Hi Bill,

Well, by now you may have noticed there's a bug-poo in vacation.  I got
mail from SunSpots, my vacation program responded to it, which then sent
mail to everyone on the list, including myself, which then prompted
another reply, which then sent mail to everyone on the list, including
myself, which then... you get the picture.

I killed the vacation program.  Please, take me off the mailing list.
----------

And From Bill LeFebvre, Moderator of SunSpots:
----------Forwarded message:
Jim, you're not on the mailing list, at least not as far as I can tell.
Perhaps you are subscribed via the bitnet list server.  I strongly suspect
that this is the case since "sunspots at icsa.rice.edu" is the relay point
for the bitnet end of the list.  Plus, I haven't seen any of these
vacation messages appear in with the regular messages.

The standard vacation program will reply to every message sent to it
(unless it decides that it already sent a message to that address), even
if the message was not specifically addressed to you.  So any messages you
get from mailing lists (such as sun-spots) will be replied to, despite the
fact that the "From:" line doesn't say "carson at rice.edu".  I have a
slightly modified version of vacation that doesn't have this problem.

I suspect that the reason it was repeatedly sending out messages was that
its history checking wasn't working.  You set up the history database with
"vacation -I".  But then you need to chmod the files "~/.vacation.dir" and
"~/.vacation.pag" to be 666.  The vacation program usually gets run as
"daemon", and needs to be able to modify this file to remember who it has
already sent messages out to.

			Bill
----------

Sorry if you were inconvenienced, but sometimes accidents happen.  Have a
good week...

Jim Carson                                    Department of Computer Science
carson at rice.edu                               Rice University
..!{uw-beaver,husc6}!rice!titan!carson        Houston, TX 77252