I have an interesting (if that's the word) example of how the current
storm of spam can really gum up the works. The RFC Editor has for 20
years been running an automated SMTP server for searching and
retrieving RFCs and other online documents. It is still used 10-20
times in a typical day. In the past size months, and with increasing
frequency, this daemon has been breaking due to spam.
What happens, apparently, is that a spammer sends a message to the RFC
Editor server, purporting to come from a site that is in fact another
automated SMTP servers. Each server is very polite, responding with an
error message including the entire request message. So they go into a
loop, being very polite to each other... This loop continues until
either our disk gets full from the log files or real requests get
completely squeezed out by this bogus traffic. We do notice, after a
few days...
I don't know how many other SMTP-based servers there are, but the
server at the IETF web site has gotten us twice, and yesterday we got
into a tango with an email-based computational server at the
Computational Biochemistry Research Group (CBRG) at the ETH in Zurich,
as in:
"PepPepSearch
AminoAcidSequence (may be in several lines)
Search the given amino acid sequence against the entire
SwissProt peptide database using Smith-Waterman's version.."
Needless to say, the RFC Editor's site did NOT wish to do a peptide or
amindo acid search, but it was very persistant in NOT wishing to.
Nor did the ETH folks REALLY want to look up an RFC, but they were
equally persistant in not doing so.
So, this is amusing in a way, but it is also a royal pain. Of course
we can put in better spam filters and some smarter mechanism to
recognize and break a loop, but like most of you I have better things
to do with my time. One solution would be to give up on automated SMTP
servers in the Internet, removing useful services for a lot of people.
Bob Braden