[rt-users] Bounce loops caused by autoresponders.

Scott A. McIntyre scott at xs4all.nl
Mon Apr 8 06:38:31 EDT 2002


Hi,

This problem is technically one caused by bad auto-responding systems
from "outsiders" but we're wondering if there's a way to handle this
inside of RT...

What happened was an external address user at foo.com emailed a queue that
allows meta-group Everyone to create/reply to tickets.  Our OnCreate
Scrip sent back a "thank you for your submission" to that user.

Unfortunately, they then routed that to user2 at foo2.org which sent back an
autoresponse to us saying thank you.  That auto-response went back to
the queue, was entered into the ticket and since another Scrip has a
NotifyAllWatchers on Correspondence, RT saw this as a new address, a new
watcher, and sent the message from user2 at foo2.org back to user at foo.com,
which forwarded to user2 at foo2.org and so on and so forth.

This happened 244 times, then for some reason stopped (nothing we did,
it happened fairly late on a Friday night).

So, the question is, is there anything that we can do inside of RT to
help catch these?  I can't see anything obvious, because as far as RT
sees, it's all new correspondence from two legitimate watchers -- other
than restricting Watcher status or changing the ACL so that Replies can
only be sent by a named Requestor/Watcher (rather than "Everyone"),
there may not be any obvious solutions.

Perhaps some way of counting "Re: Re: Re:" in Subject lines?

Any suggestions appreciated!

Thanks,

Scott





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