Sympatico smtp

[Fraser Campbell]

On Saturday 18 October 2003 01:56, Teddy Mills wrote:

> I was told by Sympatico that the email servers were bogged down by rampant
> email viruses, causing,
> essentially an indirect  DOS attack.

I don't doubt it one bit.  Yesterday I received 276 viruses, the day before 335 it's
been 200+ viruses per day for over a month.  Now my viruses aren't coming through
Sympatico's servers but still I can imagine that 40+MB of email for every user
would be an enormous problem, I rather doubt their email architecture was meant
to handle that.  If they do virus scanning the resource requirements must be
huge.

I wonder how ISPs are going to deal with this? I feel the house of cards (Windows)
is getting close to falling down.  ISPs have to take serious action (disabling
connections of customers with infections) otherwise the nightmare will just get
worse.

> This in addition to their port 25 filtering, is one reason I try and stay
> away from Sympatico, it at all posssible.

Personally I think it's irresponsible for a residential ISP to not block smtp.
Now whether they actually have monitoring in place to take advantage
of their capabilities for stopping spam and virus spread is another question.

> Sending email is the problem.
> But there are other Silly Sympatico Systemic SMTP Symptoms.
>
>
> telnet smtp1.sympatico.ca 25
> Trying 209.226.175.80...
> Connected to smtp1.sympatico.ca.
> Escape character is '^]'.
> 220 tomts33-srv.bellnexxia.net ESMTP server (InterMail vM.5.01.06.05
> 201-253-122-130-105-20030824) ready Sat, 18 Oct 2003 01:47:16 -0400
>
>
> Who the heck makes InterMail? Is that the email server?

Dunno, I agree not using postfix seems silly though ;-)

> As you can see, if you ping smtp1.sympatico.ca repeatly, you get different
> ips, 80/81/82...
>
> smtp27.sympatico.ca     internet address = 209.226.175.81
> smtp27.sympatico.ca     internet address = 209.226.175.82

This is fine, I'd be *very* worried if they did not have multiple servers,
unfortunately they might be needing more.

The quickest solution will be the day that someone writes a virus to
destroy all the Windows systems on the Internet, sadly it will destroy
countless businesses but at least the rest of us will be able to use the
Internet in peace (although we'll be very busy converting everyone to
unix and other real operating systems).  I am convinced that this is
going to happen.

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Halton Hills, Ontario, Canada                             Debian GNU/Linux

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