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[ADMIN] Virus killers running amok



Due to today's email virus incident this as a reminder for mail admins

 - an automatic system should never reply to mail with "Precedence: bulk"
   or "Precedence: list" header.  It's dangerous because such automatic mails
   may potencially result in mail loops.  Anway, bulk or list precende means
   the sender doesn't care anyway.
 - In sense of RFC2821 the reply is an error message because of non-delivery.
   An error message should only be sent to the envelope sender,
   linux-xfs-bounce@oss.sgi.com in this particular case.  Sending to the To:
   and Cc: addresses is completly broken.
 - Your software is setup to use just "Administrator" as the sender address.
   A RFC compliant mailer such as on oss.sgi.com will canonicalize the
   address of the received mail that is add it's own hostname which results
   in your mails showing up as if they were from Administrator@oss.sgi.com.
 - It's annoying for the nearly 1,000 list subscribers.  Most are running
   Linux or UNIX or have their own virus killers so don't care the least bit
   about that notification.  Automatic systems

So fix your systems.  You only have one chance - and that's your LAST
change - before you endup in mail filters around the world so use it.

  Ralf (BOFH on duty ...)