Re: Suspicious email message intercepted

[Ashley M. Kirchner]

"Echlin, Michael" wrote:

> Much the same as I got this message before I got Larry's.
> (I hate it when I get the answer before the question Don't you, makes me
> wonder what the H they are talking about. I wonder if Anthony is psychic?

    That would be because of the way mailman handles its queue.  As Chuq
explained it to me:

        "Here's why: qrunner doesn't process the queue FIFO.
         Instead, it opens up the directory and processes the
         entries sequentially. This implies that if you get a
         lot of stuff in the queue, qrunner will quit after
         15 minutes and start over.

         As qrunner processes stuff, it deletes those files. So
         as new stuff comes in, they get stored as close to the
         start of the directory inode as possible, so when
         qrunner quits and restarts, if it hasn't processed
         everything in the directory, it starts over with newer
         stuff, leaving older stuff deep into the inode -- and
         it'll never GET to that stuff deep in the inode until
         the system quiets down and it's given a change to catch
         up. That means something could literally stay in the
         queue forever if the system never slows down enough to
         allow qrunner to clean up."


    Now of course, that whole explanation is invalid IF the folks at gnu.org
changed the qrunner's lifetime

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