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Apology: I apologize for the duplicated messages which were sent to the tp750 list, and for whatever loss of service you suffered as a result. I attempt to make my mailing lists robust and reasonably immune to catastrophe, but this time it fell short of that goal. Explanation: The massive dumping of duplicate messages to the tp750 list was caused by a criminally brain-damaged mail gateway used by three of the recipients of the list. For every mail message sent to the list, the gateway was generating three separate bounce messages to the list owner (that's me). In addition, the gateway was sending the entire message back to the list. Our log files show a total of 1854 errant messages sent by that gateway before it was stopped. It took a long time to find the problem because of the tremendous traffic load which caused: our mail server to run out of swap space (thus slowing down local delivery), and my postmaster mailbox to run out of disk space (which also caused delivery failure to my tp750 mailbox). I spent quite some time attempting to clean up those problems before I realized that the tp750 list was also getting flooded. At that point I shut down our entire mail system, and spent several hours flushing all of the messages which were queued for the list, and devising a way to turn things back on again without causing another loop. All in all it took a total of about 8 hours from the time I noticed the problem until I was able to turn things back on. What makes this even more annoying (to me) is that I have contacted this site several times to warn them that their mail gateway software was likely to cause just this kind of problem, and urging them to get their software fixed. They never even bothered to reply. (In the future, I will immediately remove any site whose mail software demonstrates the same bugs as this one.) Corrective action: 1) the recipients have been permanently removed from the tp750 list 2) the mail server at cs.utk.edu now has a "dead end" route installed so that it cannot talk to the mailer that caused the problem. (the other end will always see "connection timed out"). Other actions (technical and otherwise) are being considered. Suggestions for retaliation are welcomed. Keith Moore postmaster@cs.utk.edu