You have 15,000 unread messages!

Logged into my e-mail this morning and was rather suprised to find that I had over 15,000 e-mails downloading. Even worse it was growing at over 100 per minute.

A quick check through webmail of some headers and found what was happeneing. I am one of the moderators of the nz.net.announce newsgroup and one of the other moderators had a bounce message going to the group moderation address which included himself so it was stuck in a never ending loop.

Not only was the number of messages expoentially increasing, but each message was attaching all the previous bounce messages, so the size of each one was also getting much bigger.

I didn’t fancy just e-mailing my ISP helpdesk with the problem as it can take 24 hours to respond and Jesus by then I might have been into the millions, so made Telecom some money by phoning from Italy and spending ten minutes on hold. Problem was solved within an hour thank God.