[Info-vax] TCPIP Services IMAP and POP resource consumption

[Scott Dorsey]

On Saturday, February 6, 2016 at 10:08:36 AM UTC-6, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> Had a VMS box "discovered" by some malware, and that VMS box was then=20
> used to blast out spam.   I'd briefly shut off the SMTP sending queues=20
> while troubleshooting that box, and the backlog that quickly piled up=20
> in the outgoing queues was quite impressive.

What was compromised?  Were you running an open relay or an unsecured POP
connection?

In the eighties and early nineties, running an open relay was considered a
polite thing to do because it permitted other people to use your machine to
route around network problems.  So, MTAs came configured out of the box with
open relays.  By the late nineties this became a serious problem since spammers
started taking advantage of open relays for obscuring the source of traffic
and evading blocking by address.  So, MTAs all got patches or updates or
changes to default configurations to shut the relays down.
--scott


-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."