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

[Ken Causey]

On 11/05/2013 01:59 PM, David T. Lewis wrote:
>> 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
>
>

I'm looking but at the moment I'm not seeing anything unusual in the 
logs.  Keep in mind that you are a mailing list administrator, the email 
address you use for that is going to be the target of a fair number of 
mailing list administrivia but it is also going to be a target for 
spammers.  They will email the administrative address for the list and 
that will be forwarded to you.  That said, I'm also one of those and I 
can't say that I've seen any particular increase in the issue recently.

I'm still looking but without more specific information it is very 
difficult to find the relevant needles in the haystack.  Information 
list message IDs or at least dates and periods of time would help 
tremendously.

Ken