Vat full of wrong

[serinde]

[Sfx: horrible grinding, buzz-sawing, metal-chewing noises from the construction elves out back, which is already driving me MAD, MAD I SAY.]

Long-time but often-annoying customer: "Hi, is there a problem with your mail server? Because I just sent mail to myself and it isn't in my inbox."
Your humble correspondent: "No, things are moving normally." [ed.: For a change.] "When did you send it?"
LTBOAC: "30 seconds ago."
YHC: "...I think that's within the usual standards."
LTBOAC: "Well it's ALWAYS INSTANTANEOUS!"
YHC: "Let me put you on hold while I look it up in the mail logs." *throw headset at wall*
[Time passes.]
YHC: "According to your procmail log, the mail was filtered out as spam."
LTBOAC: "That doesn't make any sense! Why would it filter out mail to me?"
YHC: *helpful hat* "Your filters will only operate on mail sent to you. They won't be used on mail that isn't to you."
LTBOAC: "That's NOT WHAT I MEANT! Why would it filter out mail FROM me?"
YHC: "Because a lot of spammers forge the From address to be the same as the To address, for that very reason."
LTBOAC: "Well why would it do that now? It's never happened before!"
YHC: "I can't tell, because you have your $TRASH set to /dev/null, so any mail filtered out is immediately deleted. If SpamAssassin filtered it out, the reasons would be in the headers, but of course we don't have those."
LTBOAC: "Apparently I'm not making my point clear. It doesn't make sense that it should filter out mail from me to me!"
YHC: "As I said, we can't see why, specifically, the mail was marked as spam, because you have it set to immediately delete anything marked so. If you want to know, you'll have to set your $TRASH to be an actual file name temporarily and resend the message, so we can see exactly what happened."
LTBOAC: "I don't want that! Then I'll have to keep clearing all the spam out of it!"
YHC: "That's why I said 'temporarily'."
LTBOAC: "Oh. Well, fine, if that's the only way." *click*

I was sufficiently annoyed after this to do some more digging. Whereupon I discovered his 586-line file of additional procmail recipes, most of which are timebombs waiting to happen just like this one:

:0:
* ^Subject:.*stock
$TRASH

I leave it to you to guess what string appeared in his deathless prose's Subject line.

Comments

[tactisle.livejournal.com]

Er... Woodstock? Livestock? Wigstock?

Oh, wait. It's December, isn't it. *facepalm*

[khrister.livejournal.com]

No jury in the world, etc.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

It gets better. If the message's journey lies entirely within the local network, SpamAssassin will give it -147 points, which should make the mail pretty solidly not spam, because SA knows which hosts to trust. (This is due to a couple of lines in the local.cf to set the networks and the large negative score.) This obviously covers a few things other than people sending themselves mail; for example, people sending other people mail.