The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

["Adam Bernstein" <address@concealed>]

> I wouldn't normally want to do this, but I'm trying to harden a Sympa 
> installation against loops, having once had an MLM enter into a "I can 
> send more than you can" argument with a badly configured out-of-office 
> auto reply.

There may be other reasons to want a silent reject, but if you
just want to avoid command loops, see the relevant sympa.conf
parameters -- I'm using:

loop_command_max        10
loop_command_sampling_delay     1800

meaning 10 commands within 1/2 hour (1800 seconds) from the same
user cause Sympa to break the loop.  That's a much lower threshhold
than the default in Sympa, but I've seen various delays cause a
delay of a few minutes in each iteration of a loop, so I wanted to
allow a generous time, and it's really hard to imagine anyone ever
sending 10 valid commands in a row.

Also, FYI, I've changed Sympa's list message precedence header from
"list" to "bulk", as more mail servers (read: MS Exchange 5.5) will
recognize that as not deserving a vacation auto-reply.  This applies
only to list messages, not commands, though come to think of it, I
could change the precedence header on commands too and avoid most of
the need for the loop_command parameters above....

    ab