Outlook Exchange - rule restrictions to prevent loops?
osaddict
London, UK
A user of mine has just created a forwarding rule to a group of which he is a member - as such a mahousive loop was created - hundreds of the same message going to everyone in the group.
Needless to say the rule is deleted now, however, my colleague pointed out surely he's not the first to do something like this - why is there not a failsafe which prompts you that it will create a loop?
I didn't have an answer, or feel like testing this kind of thing on my account (funnily enough) - has anyone been in this situation before?!
With a bucket load of group lists and aliases sitting around on the one domain I guess it could be a bit of a tall order.
Just makes me shudder to think someone could create a rule which forwards to all@domain.com and essentially brings down the entire email system for quite some time
Needless to say the rule is deleted now, however, my colleague pointed out surely he's not the first to do something like this - why is there not a failsafe which prompts you that it will create a loop?
I didn't have an answer, or feel like testing this kind of thing on my account (funnily enough) - has anyone been in this situation before?!
With a bucket load of group lists and aliases sitting around on the one domain I guess it could be a bit of a tall order.
Just makes me shudder to think someone could create a rule which forwards to all@domain.com and essentially brings down the entire email system for quite some time
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Comments
We are running an exchange environment and I just tested this idea and it doesn't work. No matter how I create the rule I can't get it to do a 1 to 1 loop. Even trying to create a loop between two accounts didn't work. I then tried looping between my work and my gmail, still didn't work one forward and that was it.
I think a more likely situation is that the e-mail he tried to send didn't get sent correctly and it got stuck in a sending loop where it kept trying to resend itself. I've seen this happen many times where someone has a massive distribution list and one of the recipients in the distribution list is wrong.
it's a group with 14 recipients - simply set up as an 'alias' i.e. xx@domain.com gets forwarded to 14 recipients - not setup as an exchange group list or distribution list etc
I guess I'll just have to hope users heed warnings and dont try to setup something like this again