Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 10:12:48 -0500 From: Nathan Vidican <webmaster@wmptl.com> To: questions@freebsd.org, isp@freebsd.org Subject: Sendmail gone crazy, proliferating emails Message-ID: <3A9137F0.C177D65F@wmptl.com>
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Here's something interesting for you... I Came into the office this morning, and found that sendmail had been duplicating incoming messages all night. I myself only found a few emails which had duplicate receivals, eg two messages same time, same sender, same content, same headers. I didn't think it was that big of a deal, until my boss calls to say some other people within the office are getting 100-200 copies of an email message. First thing I did was turn of sendmail, and cucipop. Then I skimmed the maillog, messages, and apache access logs (we're running a hacked-up version of Neomail for a web-based client; seldom-used). I didn't find anything out of the ordinary, no duplicate messages or anything. I did note the receive log in maillog had a singular log for some of the messages I was receiving several copies of. The only error message, (logged both to the screen, and to /etc/messages), was (several times for every user that had left outlook running over the weekend checking their email): Feb 19 09:04:25 home cucipop[43229]: Error locking userX's mailbox Feb 19 09:05:08 home cucipop[43236]: Error locking userY's mailbox Feb 19 09:06:26 home cucipop[43244]: Error locking userZ's mailbox The machine had been running now for 70days since the last reboot, (which was due to a power-failure, at which time the machine had been up for a similar amount of time before with no real problems). So I don't think it's a configuration problem, or else it probably would have been note before now. Also, nothing was changed on the machine for some time now; only two people have telnet/ssh access to the machine, and my boss sure as heck didn't do it, on purpose or otherwise. I then started to throw blame at MS Outlook, (using Outlook 2000 as the client software on our LAN). I figured maybe someone got a stupid little VB script which was pulling the addressbook from every internal machine and bouncing around a few hundred emails all of\ver the place or something. This wouldn't be so though, because a-sendmail would therefor have a log of each individual message being sent from outlook to wherever, and b-there were messages sent from the mail-server itself, (eg periodic daily runs via cron), which I received three or four copies of each, and I use netscape not Outlook for email personally. Seeing nothing else unusual, and having no clue what if anything was actually wrong, I started sendmail and cucipop back up. It has, (knock on wood), not had any such problems since. I still need an explanation of some sort though? What exactly happened and why? Has anyone else every seen something like this before? What caused it? Could it just be some sort of crazy fluke? Desperatly trying to make some sense of this here... if anyone out there has any ieas, questions, comments, concerns, or otherwise PLEASE feel free to contact me. I would like to get this resolved, or at least build an understanding as to why or how this happened in the firstplace. Nathan Vidican webmaster@wmptl.com Windsor Match Plate & Tool Ltd. http://home.wmptl.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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