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Subject: Re: Mail delivered over and over again
From: Bennett Todd (betrahul.net)
Date: Wed May 03 2000 - 11:02:27 CDT

Postfix is normally pretty assertive about not looping messages.

Is there any possibility that some other program is looping,
repeatedly re-sending the same message? Was this message hand-sent
or generated by a program?

Have you compared the full headers of two copies of the message to
see how they differ or resemble each other?

After fixing the aliases file, did you run newaliases to make the
change take effect?

And if you've collected a lot of copies of the message in users'
mailboxes, procmail can be a handy tool for re-filtering them to
remove the dups. E.g. if the copies all have the same Message-Id:,
and you're using mboxes in /var/spool/mail, you could filter with
something like

        cd /var/spool/mail
        for mbox in *;do
            (
                set -xe
                lockfile $mbox.lock
                formail -D 65536 $mbox.messids -s <$mbox >.foo$$
                mv .foo$$ $mbox
                rm -f $mbox.lock $mbox.messids
            )
        done

or thereabouts, at the end of which each mbox would have no more
than one copy at most of each distinct message.

In theory, two distinct messages could have the same Message-Id
(which would be a symptom of some broken software somewhere). In
practice, I haven't seen it, I do Message-Id dup elim on my email,
saving alleged dups into a separate folder, and occasionally
checking it to make sure I'm not missing anything I care about.

-Bennett

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