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It wasn't a CC, if it was then there wouldn't have been a way to stop after only some had gone out, because that's not how CC works.
by eterm 10y ago
It wasn't a CC, if it was then there wouldn't have been a way to stop after only some had gone out, because that's not how CC works.
- theoh 10y agoIsn't the CC header essentially an instruction for the local MTA? So their local MTA might could have been relatively slowly working through the CC list (contacting each recipient mail server in turn). I'm not saying this is what actually happened.
- stormbrew 10y agoNo, MTAs don't look at the To or Cc headers at all. The addresses to deliver to are listed in the SMTP rcpt to command. The MUA can provide a completely different list to what's in the headers.
- theoh 10y agoOk, good if pedantic response. I think the substance of my point stands: MTAs can take some time to work through the CC list (which, as you say, is passed to them with the "rcpt to" command by a well-behaved MUA) In other words, delivering a message to copious CC: recipients is not an uninterruptable operation even after the MUA has finished its job. They might have had to/been able to stop the local MTA to interrupt the rogue emails.
- Dylan16807 10y agoIn a scenario where the entire list is in CC, this could matter. But when your scenario is leaking a small fraction of the list members, you would have to be batching CC. Once you're batching CC, then it doesn't matter if all the emails in a batch are sent out at the same time.
- stormbrew 10y agoSorry, to clarify why this is not just pedantic, the MUA is likely to split up a long list of recipients rather than try to send an arbitrarily long list in one rcpt to command and potentially fail after a very long time processing and sending data. The fact that they don't have to be the same means that the list in the message can be arbitrarily long regardless of how the MUA batches it for the MTA. In that event, it is interruptible. Also, the MTA will batch its own outgoing sends to individual servers (giving them either just one rcpt to or all the recipients whose MX map to that server) and it could be interruptible there as well. The point is that when sending to many many delivery addresses, things get batched at various stages and become more interruptible than if your CC was the master list of how a message were routed.
- stormbrew 10y agoWhich, to clarify a bit further, is agreement with your conclusion but not how you got there, so maybe that's what you meant by pedantic. :)