Mail Turbulence
Published 19 years, 3 months pastBetween last night and late this morning, no mail was delivered to any address (mine, Kat’s, anyone else) at meyerweb.com. This happened because the mail server was so overloaded by the latest joy and sunshine from our bretheren in the mass-mailing industry that it basically died. Those lovable little spammers—is there anything they can’t ruin?
I’m told that, in theory, any mail that was sent during that period should eventually make its way to us. However, there’s always a chance that an upstream mail server would decide to drop the mail instead of retry delivery, so there’s no guarantee of its arrival. If you’ve sent us anything critical in the last 24 hours, you might want to send it again, just to be on the safe side. If it’s non-critical, better to wait a few days to see if there’s a successful redelivery attempt.
One Comment
I noted your email problem. I suffered from a similar problem until recently. My server never crashed, but it did become terribly overloaded and nearly useless. Since it is also the family print server, this was a problem.
The solution I used was OpenBSDs’ spamd with greylisting. This technique has dropped nearly all of the spam and puts very minimal load on the server.
Since you probably aren’t running OpenBSD currently on your mail server, conversion isn’t something that you’re going to want to do. You can instead install OpenBSD as a firewall on something old and small. In addition to the spam firewalling it can act as a general firewall for your network.
I don’t know if this will be the solution for you, but it’s certainly made life happier in my household.