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Thought I'd send postmaster email to my google account whilst I migrated email server settings. Thinking it would make it easy to read any error messages. Except I'd made a silly oversight with the chroot config (doh). So that when I switched the address, got email almost working, and then sent an email, it barfed, sending an email to Postmaster. Google forwarded this to me, which caused it to issue a "4xx" message deferring the message, and sending ANOTHER email to Google telling me something was wrong with the email config. Now google has 2 emails to postmaster to deliver, and when they failed, it gets sent 2 more emails saying something is wrong with the config, making 4. 4 deliveries, 4 deferrals, and 4 more emails to Postmaster. I think you can see where this is going.... 1 -> 2 -> 4 -> 8 ..... Thankfully conforming email systems back off, so that exponential growth is translated to something more linear. I figured out the mistake in a few minutes, and I think I've stopped getting error messages from Google. When I saw the log messages I thought I'd created a simple mail loop. But no it had the potential to be much worse. I guess the moral is make sure that the Postmaster account is either local, or working, when fiddling with email. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html