On Jan 26, Michael Maibaum [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: > My favorite was the last bi-monthly report from our (win NT > dominated...) IT dept...It was a 4Mb word document for about a page and > a half, plus some high res pics, plus all the revisions in the word > document. It was sent to every email address in the institution > (thousands) and nearly brought the exchange server to it's knees...our > dept survived as our mail is on a sparcstation, though it nearly filled > it's disk, our IT guy, stripped out about 10k of text and sent that to > us all....
A month or two ago, we started getting pages from our router guys asking if we knew why our Linux/qmail/etc. boxes were completely saturating our external pipe and almost taking the router down. By the time the guy that was on call got back to work, they had shut down outgoing SMTP at the firewall to at least block whatever it was, since 4 of our remote offices' Exchange servers had gone down under the load. Turns out somebody was trying to send a mail with a 3MB word doc to everyone in the company and their brother. Of course qmail happily complied, killing 4 other mail servers and almost the router in the process. We'd just recently gotten them to switch to Linux + qmail on the corporate border SMTP, and one of the managers actually suggested it was a flaw of qmail that it didn't crash at this point, to act as a break point. :) Of course we now have real limiting in place to make sure someone can't do it again.
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