Flashes of Panic: Inside job

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Inside job

It’s worse than I thought… it wasn’t just spam.

It was also one of our authors sending us a 32 megabyte Word file as an email attachment.

32 MB.

It’s wrong in so many ways, I don’t even know where to start.

The server strangled itself and spontaneously restarted six times before I could keep it stable long enough to get the culprit out of the mail queue.

Now Playing: Paralysed from Nowhere by Ride

Posted by pjm on October 26, 2004 3:27 PM | Permalink

Comments

I’m sure he also had spaces in his filename and/or didn’t add an extension to it and/or used punctuation in the filename.

Posted by: JM | October 26, 2004 3:45 PM

Egad! Time to start with limiting attatchment size, isn’t it? Or would your users have a cow?

Posted by: damocles | October 26, 2004 4:04 PM

JM, I didn’t look to see the filename. I went right in and wiped the file from the mailqueue. (sendmail accepted it, then procmail/Sanitizer/SpamAssassin et al sucked up all the system resources trying to filter it before delivery to the user mailbox.)

Damocles, good point, and you reminded me that I thought I had a size limit set. Turns out that line in sendmail.cf was commented out. Can’t figure why I would do that, but nobody else could have. I think. Anyway, we have a 2MB limit now, to go with my assertion that “if it’s too big for a floppy disk, it’s too big for email.” That’s why we have an FTP server…

Posted by: pjm | October 26, 2004 6:44 PM

Not only do you have an FTP server, but God made WinZip/pkzip/gzip/nameyourzip for a REASON! :)

Posted by: JM | October 26, 2004 8:44 PM

32 MB? That’s absurd!!!