Infinite Mail Crisis
From Scratchpad
Contents |
[edit] The Flood Begins
Early in the morning (around midnight) on Monday, July 23rd 2007 Renee "Kamikaze" Leyburn notified outgoing webmaster Ryan "T-Rex" Garwood that something was amiss with her email client, and the problem seemed to be related to the group email list.
[edit] Futile Measures
A few hours later (approximately 3:15am) Ryan awoke and checked out the situation, and immediately noticed a sizeable number of email notifications - error messages about undelivered mail. Simply deleting all of the notifications led to more being delivered at an incredible rate (often more than a dozen per minute). The cryptic error messages were little help in deciphering the reason behind the problem. Ryan then proceeded to contact other previous webmasters for ideas and waited for help in the morning.
[edit] Waiting For Help
As the hours ticked by, more and more messages began to pour in. Desperate, Ryan began to remove possible offenders from the list of recipients of the group's email list. This did not stop the messages which had begun to backlog due to the sheer volume of notifications. Eventually the Allen brothers suggested deleting the entire list which at long last stopped the problem, though the backlog of messages continued to be delivered until sometime around noon. The final count was somewhere in the ballpark of 3600 emails, which was enough to shut down several email boxes of the Ship of Fools and hampered communications for some time. Fortunately, the group is well versed in semaphore and other forms of nautical communication and were able to weather the storm.
[edit] Possible Explanations
The leading theory is that an infinite mail loop was created. Any email sent to the group's address is forwarded to all members which are listed in a special document kept at an undisclosed location. At some point that evening, one of the boxes failed (perhaps one of the @purdue.edu address of an older member) and the original email was unable to be delivered, which automatically returned an error message. However, this email message was then again forwarded to the entire group. This error message could not be delivered to the original problem inbox, however, and kicked back another error message. This repeated until more boxes were filled, which then shut down, and compounded the problem.
