I belong to a YahooGroups mailing list for a club I joined. This morning, in quick succession, I got a message, then I got a message saying it was a correction to the previous message, and then I got 13 (so far) messages with the phrase “Message Recall Failure” followed by the subject of the first message, sometimes with some spam or anti-virus catcher stuff inserted.
A google suggests that the person who sent the first message decided to use an Exchange feature that allows you to “recall” or cancel a message you sent. Evidently the recipients who use Exchange servers got these “recall” requests, but didn’t like them for some reason, probably because the original had come through the yahoogroups server rather than the originator’s server. And Exchange had expressed its disapproval of the recall message by sending a message back to the yahoogroups list address, which went out to everybody on the list.
I’m just hoping those 13 messages are it, and we don’t get any more.
Interesting; this could be used as an effective list explosion technique to try and DoS the list server (send out 1 fake “recall” message and get 13 more mails processed by the list… not bad!). Also a way of identifying lurkers using Exchange 🙂
I think Outlook can send those even without Exchange.