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Duplicate Messages

There have been reports of duplicate e-mail messages to and from Fermilab users. To help find the source of these problems the Postmaster needs as much of the the following information as possible:

  1. The source of the message
  2. The destination of the message
  3. The type of client used in sending the message (Outlook Express, Pine, Netscape Messenger, etc)
  4. Client configuration (NT, Mac, Unix, etc)
  5. Message headers. We need these in order to properly track the path of the mail message. We do NOT need the message content. These headers are sometimes hidden by the mail client. See below for details on extracting these headers from Outlook Express, Netscape Messenger, and Pine. Without the headers there is little that can be done to track email problems.
Once you have all this information send it to postmaster@fnal.gov so we can investigate the problem.


Extracting Headers

Outlook Express

Right click the message whose headers you want to view and go to properties.
Click on the Details tab.
Click on the message source button
And you should have a window with text like this in it. 
Return-Path: <c@fnal.gov>
Received: from FNAL.FNAL.Gov ([131.225.9.8]) by imapserver2.fnal.gov
          (Netscape Messaging Server 3.56)  with SMTP id 371
          for <lilianstrom@imapserver2.fnal.gov>;
          Sun, 27 Jun 1999 16:08:35 -0500
Received: from fnal.gov ("port 1059"@c.fnal.gov) by FNAL.FNAL.GOV 
          (PMDF V5.1-12 #3998) with ESMTP id 
          <01JCWFWYARQO0008TN@FNAL.FNAL.GOV> for 
          lilianstrom@imapserver2.fnal.gov; Sun, 27 Jun 1999 
          16:08:34 -0500 CDT
Date: Sun, 27 Jun 1999 16:21:19 -0500
From: <c@fnal.gov>
Subject: URL
To: Al Lilianstrom <lilianstrom@fnal.gov>
Message-id: <377695CF.84ACC01C@fnal.gov>
MIME-version: 1.0
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (Win95; I)
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
X-Accept-Language: en

Netscape Messenger

Select the message in the upper right window. Click on View, Headers, All
and the message in the bottom right window should start looking something like this; 
Return-Path:    user@fnal.gov
Received:       from FNAL.FNAL.Gov ([131.225.9.8]) by
                imapserver2.fnal.gov (Netscape Messaging Server 3.56) 
                with SMTP id 371 for
                <lilianstrom@imapserver2.fnal.gov>; Sun, 27
                Jun 1999 16:08:35 -0500
Received:       from fnal.gov ("port 1059"@userspc.fnal.gov) by
                FNAL.FNAL.GOV (PMDF V5.1-12 #3998) with ESMTP id 
                <01JCWFWYARQO0008TN@FNAL.FNAL.GOV> for 
                lilianstrom@imapserver2.fnal.gov; Sun, 27 Jun 1999 
                16:08:34 -0500 CDT
Date:           Sun, 27 Jun 1999 16:21:19 -0500
From:           Joe User <user@fnal.gov>
Subject:        URL
To:             Al Lilianstrom <lilianstrom@fnal.gov>
Message-ID:     <377695CF.84ACC01C@fnal.gov>
MIME-version:   1.0
X-Mailer:       Mozilla 4.5 [en] (Win95; I)
Content-type:   text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-transfer-encoding:      7bit
X-Accept-Language:      en

Pine

In Pine select the message you want to read and open it up so that it looks like this:
Now hit the 'h' key and all the headers should appear.

Then 'F' to forward the message. When it asks if you want to include the message as an attachment answer 'No' and then you should see a forwarded message you can address to postmaster or helpdesk.

This is the kind of information needed to investigate problems like this. Forwarding the messagee does not always work so you may have to cut and paste them into a new mail message in order to send them (along with as much of the other information as possible) to helpdesk@fnal.gov.

   email helpdesk@fnal.gov