[rt-users] Bounce loops caused by autoresponders.

[Bruce Campbell]

On Mon, 8 Apr 2002, Scott A. McIntyre wrote:

> 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...

In my opinion, anything that contributes to a mailing loop is a Bad
Thing(tm).

> 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.

The solution that I use is a more generic one, consisting of two Scrips.
The first Scrip places a magic string in the User's comment field if they
have sent more than [number] mails in the last [time period] to the RT
system.  If they have sent less than [2nd number] in the last [time
period], the magic string is removed from their comment field.

The second Scrip squelches the mail out of the transaction (currently only
autoreply) if the magic string is present in the User's comment field.

This has so far worked for my installation, not that we have much traffic
through it ;)

Both UpdateSquelch and AutoReplySquelch should be in
http://www.fsck.com/pub/rt/contrib/2.0 .

Regards,

-- 
                             Bruce Campbell                            RIPE
                   Systems/Network Engineer                             NCC
                 www.ripe.net - PGP562C8B1B                      Operations