At 11:30 AM 5/18/02, "John R Levine" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Yes, indeed. That's because their servers are melting down from the torrents of spam and they're desperate. I know several of them, this is what they tell me.
I'd take their whines with a grain of salt. Spammers love to use "server.com" as a fake host to stick in their headers in order to cover their tracks. Over the years, we've received tons of bounces and complaints about spam allegedly from us. For years, Server.com's MX was hosted by an ISP in Massachusetts. They had been an ISP for years, had decent admins and a robust infrastructure. Last year, they panicked because someone sent large amounts of spam to nonexistent AOL accounts and they were getting hammered by bounces. The ISP simply erased our MX record (they handled our NS as well) and all of the email went to "server.com" which was our main webserver. Thousands of bounce messages started flowing in. Our server held up fine. The load average didn't even go over 2.0. I called the ISP and asked what the big deal was. He replied that the storm must be over and he put the MX record back in. An hour later, he took it out. Again I explained to him that my one server which was doing double duty was handling the bounces just fine. When it got through the backlog, the load average went to less than 1. He couldn't believe it. He got the email admins together and they went over the multiple email servers, fine tuned them, pronounced the problem solved and put the MX back in. They lasted two hours this time. The problem was they were using an MTA which would accept all messages and spool them. The servers were croaking from all of the bogus bounce messages in their queue. I was using Sendmail which would bounce messages for bogus users without accepting them. They wouldn't believe me though. They insisted that MTAs had to accept messages and spool them. Sean Brunnock http://server.com
