3 replies to this topic

[TTHQ Staff]

We've had another hacker break in to the server and has been sending PayPal phishing emails from our mailserver. We had to shut things down until we could resolve the issue and delete the emails queued up for delivery.

We may have a few more outages forthcoming as the last of the bugs are stomped. Please be patient with us-- we're working as hard as we can.

Remember, if you can, you can always donate to the cause.

[Sentient Being]

Thanks, I'm putting in a new computer and for a moment I thought it was all screwed up, then I realized you must be down. Wanna know how to make a windows email server have a heart attack?

Edited by Sentient Being, 21 October 2007 - 12:04 PM.

[TTHQ Staff]

Perfect timing, eh?

[Sentient Being]

Yeah, it was one of those moments. I cried "what the blank happened to my internet connection" as I was setting up the new system...then I realized it might be the site! We had an internal user stumble over a unigue way to crash our email servers. He sent a 180 Meg email to a huge mailing list. Turns out that oversized email is not stopped at the client side but at the server side. And that when emailing a list, a separate email is created for each person on the list. So we had hundreds of 180meg emails being created...the server never got around to sending out the over size limit bounce back....it just quietly froze up under the load! LAUGH. We lost one server and about 200 desks. I'm not sure if they are going to try and come up with a fix so this doesn't happen again or not. I've been there 8 years and this is the first time that ever happened. It's sort of like a denial of service attack but from INSIDE the firewall.