The Pencil Guy: Hourann's illogical blog

How to bring down a mail server

Today while I was at work UWA’s central mail relay server melted. Well, not literally, but it was overwhelmed by spam being sent by zombied computers on account of the latest worm outbreak. (Speaking of said outbreak, twas amusing to see a column I sometimes read claiming that the same hole these worms are using wasn’t a big issue …)

This was only a 45-minute outage, but it just so happened to coincide with me getting a bunch of new spam messages in a few minutes. Hrm.

A bunch of new spam

Curiously enough we didn’t get a horde trying to beat down our support office door like what normally happens when a big server goes down. Maybe people didn’t care their e-mail didn’t work because of all the rain today?

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