|
USENIX Tenth System Administration Conference (LISA
'96)
Automatic and Reliable Elimination of E-mail
Loops Based on Statistical Analysis
E. Solana, V. Baggiolini, M. Ramluckun, and J. Harms
University of Geneva (Switzerland)
Abstract
One of the major threats to the E-mail service are message loops,
mail messages which endlessly circulate between a number of E-mail
relays and severely deteriorate or even interrupt the messaging
service. Although the standards ruling E-mail communications
include mechanisms to prevent message loops, these mechanisms are
often unimplemented and, if they are, can fail to work reliably
under certain circumstances. This paper describes a novel approach
to the automatic and reliable elimination of looping messages.
Statistical properties of the message traffic are analyzed to
detect messages that might be looping. Such messages are earmarked,
and if they are observed to actually be looping, they are
eliminated. This method has been implemented and successfully
applied in the multi-protocol E-mail environment of the University
of Geneva.
View the full text of this paper in PDF,
ASCII (27,300 Bytes) and
POSTSCRIPT (717,969 Bytes) form.
To Become a USENIX Member, please see our
Membership Information.
|
Need help? Use our Contacts page.
Conference Index