Thu Nov 19 21:42:15 PST 1998 — Starting around 8pm or so, our mail server was severely impacted by a tremendous influx of email. Someone spammed AOL from a forged domain name, and unfortunately, we host that domain. This means that the tens of thousands of bounce messages were returned to the domain owner’s mailbox. [As of Fri Nov 20 00:31:16, I’ve counted 23,000 messages so far. /sd]
That wouldn’t have been a problem — except, AOL’s mail server farm was all cooperating to deliver these messages. In other words: thundering herds of AOL mail servers stampeded Sub, our mail server. We resolved that by turning off connectivity between AOL’s server farm’s networks and us, and then slowly bringing up connectivity, allowing traffic to clear one network at a time. I’ll post more about that on news:sonic.general. -Scott