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BT Funnels All Customers' Sent Emails Into One Guy's Inbox (theregister.co.uk)
Shaun Nichols, reporting for The Register: The UK's biggest broadband provider BT redirected its customers' outgoing emails to a single account for three hours on Tuesday. The telco said the flooded inbox was an internal account it uses for test purposes and not a random unlucky subscriber. While BT did not provide details on the reason for the disruption, it appears to be the result of testing or maintenance gone awry. "A small number of customers reported an issue sending emails earlier. Sorry about this, it's fixed now," BT said in a statement to El Reg. "The mailbox in the delivery failure notification was for internal/test use and appeared in error, sorry for any confusion that caused." The emails were going to an account which belonged to someone named Steve Webb. The Register reports that Steve Webb works for one of BT's contractors. For Webb, I fear, Tuesday wasn't a productive day.
This Steve, is what happens when you piss off a sysadmin.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Sounds more like this "Contractor" Steve Webb might have been collecting intell for a bit, and BT just turned the spigot on full by accident?
I'm not really aware of the postfix configuration parameter 'forward_all_mail_to'. Typically, a mail transfer agent program will look up a recipient in a user table, and if there's no match, will bounce the message. How are they configured that Steve can become the default recipient for all mail... by accident? Suspicious to say the least.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Reminds me of a time back in the mid-1990s. I was helping run a server which hosted an email list. It had a 500 MB hard drive, which was wasn't huge but was fine for our purposes at the time. Someone tried to email an *uncompressed* photo (BMP instead of JPG) from a 2 MP digital camera (so about 6 MB in size) to the entire mailing list. The email server had dutifully copied the photo to the mailbox for each recipient whose mail was hosted on the server, until it ran out of disk space and crashed. It also got bounce messages from systems whose wiser admins had blocked attachments that large, which filled up the the mail admin's mailbox with multiple copies of the 6 MB photo (one per bounce - we'd configured the mail admin to get copies of all bounce messages so we could prune dead addresses from the list).
It crashed hard - I couldn't even login over the network. I had to use the console to get in and figure out what the problem was. The first few copies of the photo I deleted from people's mailboxes, postfix (or whatever email server we were using) noticed there was now space available on the drive, and immediately copied the photo to more recipients' mailboxes thus filling the disk again. I had to take a crash course on postfix to figure out how to delete an email from the send queue.