[Box-Admins] Re: I am missing all emails from lists.squeakfoundation.org for the last few days

[David T. Lewis]

> On Tue, Nov 05, 2013 at 12:22:12PM -0500, David T. Lewis wrote:
>> > On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 08:30:09PM -0500, David T. Lewis wrote:
>> >> Hi,
>> >>
>> >> I receive all my personal email at lewis at mail.msen.com, including
>> mail
>> >> from mailing lists originating from lists.squeakfoundation.org. The
>> >> lists include:
>> >
>> > Could you please forward a copy of ALL the headers (or the whole
>> > message) for one email that came through in the past? Makes tracing
>> > things much faster.
>> >
>>
>> Hi Michael,
>>
>> I put a sample email message in /tmp/lewis-mail/sample on
>> shell.msen.com.
>
> We saw one issue - looks like box2.squeakfoundation.org might have
> been spamming. Some of the checks people use are a bit too sensative.
> Whitelisted so it should not be an issue.  If anything OTHER than box2
> sends mail, you might mention it and we can make sure it's OK.
>

Thanks Michael,

That's interesting. There was in fact a failure in a web app server running
on box2.squeak.org that lasted several days and was resolved only
yesterday. The web app (visible as http://source.squeak.org) is a
repository that holds the source code for an open source project that I am
involved with. It is essentially a version control repository, but it also
generates email notifications to various subscribers. Something went wrong
in that web application, and this may well have been generating some bad
email traffic.

Did the spamming from box2 look like actual spam (phishing attacks etc) or
did it look like a large number of, or repeat copies of, otherwise
legitimate messages?

When I first noticed that my mailing list updates had gone silent, I
assumed that is was related to the web app failure described above. I
later noticed that other people were receiving normal updates, and that I
could receive mailing list updates if I sent them to an account on gmail,
hence my request to you for help yesterday (thanks!!! again for the
assistance). But the bottom line is that my loss of email apparently *was*
directly related to the problem on box2.squeak.org.

I am sending a CC to the box-admins mailing list, which is where the
adminstrators (including myself) for box2.squeakfoundation.org and the
source.squeak.org web app reside.

Folks, it appears that one side effect of the kind of SqueakSource failure
that we experienced over the weekend is that we might inadvertently
generate a lot of email traffic. Alternatively, we may have had a mail
related issue that was somehow involved in the SqueakSource failure.

Dave