Subject: mail bombs

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 1997 17:07:08 -0400 (EDT)

I am very commonly mail bombed by my friends, I often wonder how they send me
mail bombs.  I was wondering if you could tell me how one sends a mail bomb.
 I would really appreciate it, if not that's okay, i guess.

---

From: Rick Byers <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 1997 18:24:20 -0500 (EST)

I would suggest you contact your (friends) provider.  I had a number of
kids continuously send each other mailbombs, just as a joke.  The problem
was, that it would send them concurrently, causing hundreads of smail
daemons to be executed at once (they would usually send thousands of
message at a time).  If they let it go long enough (not too long) the
system would eventually run out of open file descriptors and come to a
grinding halt.  I'm only part time - so I just got messages from staff
telling me that canal crashed - and it was to late for me to be able to
tell what caused.  After about a week of this, it started to happen once
when I was in, and I tracked it down to a tonne of smail processes
running.

I quickly fixed it up (removing thousands of queued messages), and
cancelled those users account.  They insist they didn't know, I say too
bad.  They're just lucky we didn't decide to sue them - it was clearly an
abuse of the system.  Many of our other users were angry about the
reboots.  I know one of this kids Father (who owned the account) was very
upset at the kid, I suspect he'll be grounded for a long time....

Rick - IAW

P.S. You might want to relay this message to your friends before they have
a phone call from a not-as-friendly-as-I system administrator.

>  I would really appreciate it, if not that's okay, i guess.

=========================================================================
Rick Byers                                      Internet Access Worldwide
[email-masked]                                      System Administrator
Welland, Ontario, Canada                                    (905)714-1400
http://www.iaw.on.ca/rickb/                         http://www.iaw.on.ca/

---

From: Lea <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 1997 16:38:37 -0600 (MDT)

> kids continuously send each other mailbombs, just as a joke.  The problem
<snip>
> bad. 

I'm continually amazed at the things the kids here do and then
claim they didn't know what the consequences of their actions
would be.  One kid, once, sent not one but *eight* WALL commands
to the system (the Unix geeks on the list will get that one)
before we disabled wall and suspended his account.  Said he 'just
wanted to see what it would do'.  Eight iterations of the command
later we were swamped with complaints, and he apparently still
didn't quite get what it would do.
Two students, who work for us at the helpdesk part time, and who
both know better, mailbombed each other on the Computing Sciences
server here and lost their accounts for a month for their
troubles.  Severely affected their studies and their ability to
do their assignments, but got the point across that stupidity
like that is a blatant waste of much-needed resources and won't
be put up with.
Put bluntly, what your friends are doing is immature, stupid,
wasteful, and potentially harmful to themselves and others.  
Don't follow suit;  you'll only make yourself look as juvenile as
they do.

Lea

---

From: Robin S Socha <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 00:54:34 +0200 (CEST)

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  >would be. 

Let's face it: That kid's from aol. I tried to contact [email-masked]
because of some other twits who wanted to send mailbombs... *rotfl*
demanding that their accounts be closed. I even used my official account
with the Govt. for it. Didn't work.

Being a regular reader of this list, I'd like to suggest permanently
filtering @aol, @compuserve and @t-online.de from the mailing list. Any
objections? >:->

TIA

Later,
Robin

- -----
Robin S. Socha,
Political Science Dept., Bonn University, Bonn
Key fingerprint = 7F F2 84 73 CF E9 2C 92  F6 6E F9 B4 8F FE AC 1E
To get my pgp public key, send an e-mail with the subject "get pgp-key"

GMC d++ s+:+ a- C++ UL++$>+++$ P+>++$ E>+ W- N+ o@ w--- M-- PS--- PE+++ Y+
PGP++>+++ t+() 5-- tv++(+) b+++ DI++ D+(++) G++>+++ e++>+++ h r++>+++ y+**

Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly.
It just happens to be selective about who it makes friends with.

---

From: Rick Byers <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 1997 19:07:55 -0500 (EST)

> filtering @aol, @compuserve and @t-online.de from the mailing list. Any

Sounds good... Too bad we can't get filters like that installed on every
major backbone router eh? <grin>

Rick

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