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

[David T. Lewis]

> 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.

Hi Ken,

It's probably best if you treat this just as an "FYI". I don't think that
any more specific information is going to be available from my ISP. The
fact that the mail delivery at my ISP flagged box2 as a "bad guy" in this
time frame might be pure coincidence, but it seemed like enough of a
coincidence that I aught to pass the information along to the list.

Dave