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Unclaimed accounts + autoresponders -> infinite loop

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jon

11 May, 2009 05:15 PM

Heya

Our autoresponders seem to have got stuck in a never-ending conversation with mailer daemons. From what I can tell, here's what happened:

1. Someone ([email blocked]) sent an email to our support address

2. Tender picked it up and created a new support request from it, but didn't recognise the email address and changed it to [email blocked]

3. Tender's autoresponder sent a "Thanks for your inquiry" mail to [email blocked].

4. smtp.xc88.engineyard.com sends a reply saying 'that user doesn't exist'

5. Tender picked that up and created a support request from it

6. Tender's autoresponder sent a "Thanks for your inquiry" mail to [email blocked]

7. smtp.xc88.engineyard.com sends a reply saying 'that user doesn't exist'

8. Repeat steps 5-7 ad naeseum

I now have 25 new support requests from the mailer daemon's autoreply - I've disabled Tender's autoresponder for now.

(incidentally, is there a faster way of deleting support requests that going to each individual page and deleting? There's "mark as spam" under the Action link, shame there isn't a delete...)

Anyone else seeing this problem?

Cheers,

Jon

1. 1 Posted by jon on 11 May, 2009 05:37 PM

   

   Actually, new support requests are continuing to be created. Looking at the timestamps, I think that tender and smtp.xc88.engineyard.com were exchanging emails at a rate of around 30 every second, and some background Tender process is still slowly converting those over to support requests. Given it was running for a few minutes before I shut the autoresponder down, I'm a bit worried that support requests are going to carry on being created for quite a while. Any chance you could auto-delete them?

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2. 2 Posted by Kyle Neath (Git... on 11 May, 2009 08:44 PM

   

   Ouch! Sorry about that Jon. We're looking into that right now and will have a fix deployed soon.

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3. 3 Posted by Kyle Neath (Git... on 11 May, 2009 09:57 PM

   

   Alright, we deployed a fix for this. Autoresponders should not be posting to unclaimed email addresses any longer.

   Would you like us to go through and delete the extra discussions still? Let me know and we can go through them.

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4. Kyle Neath (GitHub Staff) closed this discussion on 11 May, 2009 09:57 PM.

5. jon re-opened this discussion on 12 May, 2009 08:39 AM

6. 4 Posted by jon on 12 May, 2009 08:39 AM

   

   If you're able to get rid of them via some console magic, yes please. It would take me quite a while to clear them out from the web interface.

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7. 5 Posted by jon on 12 May, 2009 09:36 AM

   

   Hmm, actually I don't think just skipping unclaimed addresses is going to fix things.

   Some spamming asshole just posted an email to our support address, using that same address as his From address. So now Tender is posting autoresponses to itself, creating support tickets, and autoresponding to them.

   It's not pretty.

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8. 6 Posted by rick on 12 May, 2009 09:51 PM

   

   I'm adding a fix for this so that Tender support addresses won't get any more mail from Tender.

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9. 7 Posted by Jonathan del St... on 13 May, 2009 07:16 AM

   

   Thanks. Could you also clear out some of the 2900 discussions that
   we've got created from this? The background job runner seems to still
   be creating new discussions, 20 hours after I turned off the
   autoresponder

   Incidentally, is fixing it in a case by case basis (don't send to
   unclaimed accounts, don't send to support accounts) going to work
   here? Surely if I just spoof my From address to a non-existent
   address, you're going to run into the same problem?

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10. 8 Posted by rick on 13 May, 2009 07:24 AM

    

    Er yea, I had no idea it was that many :)
    

    I pushed the fix tonight. It works if you have the email setup in your email settings. For instance, sending email from [email blocked] won't send the autoresponders. I'll have to add [email blocked] to the list of banned emails I suppose.

    Also, you'll have to let me know what site you're referring to with the 3000 comments.

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11. 9 Posted by Jonathan del St... on 13 May, 2009 07:30 AM

    

    Oh yeah, sorry :). It's audioboo.fm, though the account might be for
    'Best Before'

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12. 10 Posted by rick on 13 May, 2009 08:31 AM

    

    Okay, I deleted thousands of discussions from your account. I also added a custom mail header of X-Tender so that Tender doesn't try to create discussions from its own responses:

    Subject: test
    Mime-Version: 1.0
    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
    X-Tender: autoreply
    
    Hey rick,
    
    Thanks for opening a support ticket!  It's been added to the queue, and we'll be taking a look as soon as we can.
    If you want to follow this online, you can do so at:
    

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13. 11 Posted by jon on 13 May, 2009 09:16 AM

    

    Awesome, thanks

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