Autoresponders – a loop

Saturday, 02 August 2008

This past week I encountered an interesting situation between two web applications I work with regularly. The first is the goldfish autoresponder for postfix. The second is RT: Request Tracker.

The situation went something like this:

• I had a ticket in RT that I wanted to resolve.
• I set the form to cc the comment to a group of users who were interested in the details of the resolution.
• I applied the ticket in RT.
• RT cc’ed the users about the resolution.
• One of the users had an autoresponder setup using goldfish, so it emailed back to RT about the user’s absence.
• RT opened a ticket with the content of the email from the autoresponder, faithfully attaching the subject explaining the user’s absence.
• RT then responded to the user’s email account about the new ticket’s creation.
• Again goldfish autoresponds to a message from RT, creating a loop.

Every five minutes a new ticket was being created in RT because of goldfish’s configuration and cron job being set to run that often. I caught the cycle happening when the incoming queue of tickets had three or four created with their subjects typical of those created by an autoresponder.