Looping E-mails Beat The Net Down

Staili writes "Singapore-based women's magazine caused problems when it forwarded its mails to a large list of recipients, mainly mailing lists. In addition to security@suse.com, some help and subscribe lists were included; the type of addresses that tend to send out an automatic reply confirming receipt. And the loop was ready." I'm sure anyone who's messed with mail enough has accidentally created a loop or two in their day, but this is really slimey.

Comments

happened at my school once...

[jeffy124]

back when i was a freshman in college someone managed to assemble an email list of all the students/faculty/staff. It was first used by someone outside the school to spam the entire campus, with all the addresses in the To and Cc fields, making the list available to anyone who received it. So someone attempted to sell their Chem Eng books, and you can picture the hell that broke out.

Quickly the list became nothing but people hitting reply-all and saying "knock it off!" and "get me off the list!" Of course, all those emails and addresses in the emails meant trouble for the mail server, causing mail to get delivered multiple times and DOS'ing normal mail.

It got so bad that I had about 100 emails in a five minute span at one point. It took a Dean's sending out an email to an announcements list pointing out school policy on mass mailings to stop it.

Thankfully, everyone from those trying to sell stuff to those saying "quit it!" all had to write a 500-word essay about why what they did was wrong.

oh yeah, i created a loop

[legLess]

I once inherited a smallish network (70 nodes) that was using an NT box as a web gateway and mail server. It was running something called Xtramail, which is a truly bloody horrible piece of software. While I was trying to figure out how to gracefully get rid of this box (a 486 on ISDN), one of the users wanted to create a mailing list.

Ok, no problem. Read the docs, slurp this list, check these buttons, viola. One of the cute little checkboxes was "Only allow owner to send list mail." Duh - I checked it. The guy sent his email (only about 200 list members) and we went home.

I came in the next morning to 20,000 emails just in the queue. That fucker sent our tens of thousands of emails overnight, because the send restrict wasn't working. There were a couple dead addresses on the list, and they of course bounced - and Xtramail politely returned those bounces to the entire list. Wash, rinse, repeat. If that place had had a real server and a real 'net connection, it could have sent millions of emails in that time. As it was, many people on the list were (quite justifiably) pissed.

So I called up whoever owned Xtramail at that time (Artisoft at that time, but a different company now - can you say, "hot potato?") and had a slightly polite shit fit. The guy flat-out refused to acknowledge it was a problem, until I made him go through the same steps on his local copy.

Crickets.

"Uh, looks like that option isn't working. I'll have to file a bug report." Then I spent another 45 minutes trying to get accounting to refund the $200 I'd given them for the support call.

They never did fix the bug, but I gave up my plans to have a graceful transition. I pulled that POS out the same day and installed another little NT mailer, quite a nice one, until I replaced the whole thing with a qmail FreeBSD box.

No moral to the story, really ('cept I should have been more paranoid, and tested the list more). But I bet more than a few readers have had that quick "oh shit" feeling as they saw the queue filling up.