88 Mail
tralia, Britain, France, and all over the U.S. I speculate that the list
has at least 200 recipients, and about 25% of them are actually UUCP
sites that are MX’d on the Internet.I destroyed about 4,000 copies of the error message in our queues
here at Apple Computer.After I turned off our SMTP daemon, our secondary MX sites got
whacked. We have a secondary MX site so that when we’re down,
someone else will collect our mail in one place, and deliver it to us in
an orderly fashion, rather than have every host which has a message
for us jump on us the very second that we come back up.Our secondary MX is the CSNET Relay (relay.cs.net and
relay2.cs.net). They eventually destroyed over 11,000 copies of the
error message in the queues on the two relay machines. Their post-
mistress was at wit’s end when I spoke to her. She wanted to know
what had hit her machines.It seems that for every one machine that had successfully contacted
apple.com and delivered a copy of that error message, there were
three hosts which couldn’t get ahold of apple.com because we were
overloaded from all the mail, and so they contacted the CSNET
Relay instead.I also heard from CSNET that UUNET, a major MX site for many
other hosts, had destroyed 2,000 copies of the error message. I pre-
sume that their modems were very busy delivering copies of the error
message from outlying UUCP sites back to us at Apple Computer.This instantiation of this problem has abated for the moment, but I’m
still spending a lot of time answering e-mail queries from postmas-
ters all over the world.The next day, I replaced the current release of MAIL*LINK SMTP
with a beta test version of their next release. It has not shown the
header mangling bug, yet.The final chapter of this horror story has yet to be written.The versions of sendmail with this behavior are still out there on hun-
dreds of thousands of computers, waiting for another chance to bury
some unlucky site in error messages.