Re: List service interruption

To follow up on my own message... the problem was greater than the
viruses alone.  The server www.freeciv.org was sending mail (likely
virus mail) with forged From addresses.  The complete.org server (which
hosts the mailing list) would respond with "450 sender domain must
resolve" (a measure to trap just such problems.  This, unfortunately,
meant that the www.freeciv.org server would continue to try sending
these messages.

It got to the point where, at times, I would receive many of these
attempts *per second* from the www.freeciv.org server.  I decided to, on
a temporary basis, permenantly reject all mail from that server to get
all these viruses out of the system.  (That ban was in place for a total
of about 5 minutes... Hopefully that will clear things up.)

I do not know why www.freeciv.org is sending these weird virus messages;
the To: line seems to be random people under the freeciv.org domain.
Perhaps somebody can check on that.

Thanks,
John

On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 07:26:09PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I received a message today from someone indicating that the Freeciv
> lists were down.  Indeed, that was the case.  The culprit appears to be
> the recent spate of viruses.  The mail server at complete.org is
> configured to limit the number of simultaneous SMTP connections it will
> serve, as a way to keep the mail system from taking down everything
> else.  The system was so flodded with viruses that this limit was hit
> for the first time ever.  Your message may have not made it to the
> server (in which case, it will likely be delivered later), or it may
> have made it but could not be delivered.  I have now raised the limit,
> which appears to have made everything happy again.
> 
> If you wrote a message to a FreeCiv list, I suggest waiting
> approximately four hours; if it has not shown up by then, you should
> resend.
> 
> My apologies for the inconvenience.
> 
> -- John
>