[USCC] CC Message Issues Again

[Jim McNelly]

Dear List members,

Sorry to keep bringing this issue up, but we have some new 
information on the CC copy message problem.

Approximately 5% of our members have a bug in their e-mail software 
that is putting their e-mail address into the "REPLY TO:" line of 
their message header in addition to the USCC list.  Consequently, 
when other members hit "REPLY" to their message, and only to these 5% 
of our members, the reply sends the message to the sender AND to the 
USCC list.  This is one explanation for the repeated duplicate CC 
message problem that is confusing our members, resulting in duplicate 
messages and leading to them to think that their private reply is 
going only to the sender, not to the public USCC list as well.

This problem has gotten worse recently because three of our members 
who have this bug in their software have been posting regularly to 
the list and ALL replies to their messages are showing up with second 
e-mail addresses in the TO: line!  We are notifying these members 
that their mail reading software has this bug and asking them to look 
into it or have their network administrator change their REPLY TO: 
settings.  It must be fixable because 95% of our sender's e-mails are 
fine, while every message from the problem e-mail accounts has this bug.

I have several e-mail and networking consultants looking into the 
problem for us and we are asking our members that have this bug to 
ask their networking administrators to look into it as well.  We do 
not yet know where the bug is, but it appears to be in the mail 
configuration software of the sender, not in our list management 
software.  We thought that maybe our members were responding with 
"REPLY TO ALL" instead of just "REPLY", but the problem is more than that.

Until this bug was pointed out to me today, I assumed that our 
members were deliberately adding other e-mail addresses to the CC or 
TO: lines of their messages when sending messages to the USCC 
list.  This was driving us crazy, seemingly making this problem 
impossible to stop.

Until we find out how to shut off this bug that comes from these few 
members's software, I am asking each sender to our list to look 
carefully at the header when sending a reply to the USCC list.  The 
second e-mail address is being added by a bug in the first sender's 
software and can be caught and removed by the second sender.  Just 
look carefully when sending a message to the USCC list and make sure 
that there was not a second address added in your TO: line.

Perhaps some other network administrator can tell us how this "REPLY 
TO:" bug is happening to only a few individuals and help us get to 
the bottom of the problem.  It is probably a feature or bug that can 
be turned off and hopefully this problem will finally go away.

At least I now know that most of this duplicate e-mail problem is 
inadvertent.  It was quite disconcerting to see the duplicate e-mail 
addresses appearing again and again.  For those of you who sent 
duplicate e-mails and received nasty responses from a moderator, 
accept our apologies and please feel free to send messages again.

Thank you for your understanding and patience while we work on this problem.


Jim McNelly
US Composting Council
Discussion List Moderator
jim at composter.com
www.compostingcouncil.org
www.composter.com