Author: Victor Churchill Date: To: Hampshire LUG Discussion List Subject: [Hampshire] Think you will never fill your GMail account? Think
again...
I don't have a blog and seldom feel the need for one, but this is a
classic. I'll copy a slightly sanitised excerpt from an email I sent
this morning to a colleague.
Hi Xxxx,
I am afraid I had to take drastic action Sunday night - we got back
from being away for the weekend, I checked me mail, found I was *Over
My GMail Quota* and that most of that was copies of XxxxSystem emails -
went and looked at the server and its disk was 100% full.
Turns out that the XxxSystem gateway has been going ape over the weekend.
It sent our server 3450 emails between 13:00 on July 11 and midnight on Jul 12.
These totalled 4.2 gigabytes. That was pretty naughty but we could
have managed . However, read on...
Trouble is, the procmail script on the server sends me a notification
email when it receives these ZzzSystem mails, so that I know what is
happening. So it sent me a copy of all these 3450 mails totalling 4.5+
GB.
So my email quota got exhausted. And what happens when an email inbox
is full... a "your message could not be delivered" message gets
returned to the issuer.
(Can you see where this is heading yet...?)
That's right, Googlemail sends a reply back to xxxproc@???
saying Tough Luck, could not deliver that email to Victor.
So xxxproc@??? says "ah, here is an email for me to
process. Oh dear, it is not a CSV I recognise. I had better put it in
the Failed directory and let Victor know." Except...
Yep, fifteen thousand email bounces later, and counting....
When I got onto it last night the poor server was on its knees.
