Do any of you work in the IT industry?

[groovewonder]

Do any of you work in the IT industry by chance? Any programmers in here or anyone familiar with running a web host. Got a problem I can't seem to crack and neither can my web host.

For some reason, one of the email addresses on our web host is duplicating it's email 500 times EACH EMAIL and i can't figure out why. Maybe one of you knows. Maybe not. All of the other addresses are having any problems at all, but one of them is having a horrible problem and it happens to be my boss'.

Anyway, if any of you have any ideas, it'd be helpful. Strange problem. At first I thougt it was maybe an email attack, but EVERY email is being duplicated, even emails from me and other co-workers. [scratches head in frustration]

[groovewonder]

sorry. didn't mean to hit submit twice and make two of the same topic.

[cstaylor]

You need more details: what emails do you mean? Are you running an email server? What server are you running?

It sounds like you've got an alias wrong in your sendmail aliases file, but without knowing what server you're running...

[groovewonder]

i'm pretty sure it's running on Apache. but if i run phpinfo() it lists freeBSD which I am completely unfamiliar with. is that something separate?

[cstaylor]

That's the web server. Do you mean your boss is receiving regular emails 500 times, or email notifications from the web server 500 times?

[groovewonder]

he's receiving every single email that is being sent to him 500 times. for example, if i send him one email, he'll get it 500 times.

[American Oyaji]

ouch

[cstaylor]

Okay, that sounds like an alias loop. If you need help solving this, we can do this via private message (as I'd like you to send me your boss's email address so I can figure out where the email should be going).

-Chris

[groovewonder]

sorry for disappearing, and i appreciate the help. the friendly people at tierranet.com finally took care of things. i was starting to get awfully tired of my boss calling, asking when he'd be back to normal. i can totally understand his situation though. i'd be pissed if i was getting 5000+ emails a day too..

anyway, alias loop. that sounds interesting. how would that work though? i'm sure tierranet has tons of email aliases on it's server, so why would just one of them have a problem? care to carry on the discussion? i have no idea about these sorts of things. i just write code and interview people from time to time.

thanks anyway though. greatly appreciate it.

[cstaylor]

Well, if the problem is at the destination, the email server will receive a single email with a destination email account name in the header. The mail server's job is to interpret that address and deliver it to the right spool file (I'm assuming Unix Sendmail here... different mail servers do this in different ways). However, sendmail looks at an aliases file to decide where to deliver the email. This is the most likely place where a loop can occur.

[groovewonder]

I can understand so far, I think. But I'm still confused about why this happened to only one alias and not all of the others. I guess I'm a dummy in this area.

[cstaylor]

I'm just guessing about the alias loop, so it may not have been the cause. Did the ISP tell you what the problem was?

[groovewonder]

nope, never told me what caused it. didn't even tell me they fixed it. just suddenly, my boss' email was back to normal, so i'm guessing they figured it out and didn't bother letting me know what caused it. probably some dumb embarassing glitch or something.. i know how that feels.