[Cloverfield]

Well, I have found out why the forums are running slow and sluggish over recent weeks.

*begins long winded story*

Well not quite. But a few weeks ago, I began to have a problem where a spammer was sending email with my domain (oddworld.au.com) as the return path. As a result I was getting all the bouncebacks, which got to over 3000 emails in under 24 hours until I realized I could turn it off and send it into internet nothingness. I thought it was connected to my domain only, but was wrong.

I suspected that something was still up 2 days ago, when I got another return email sent to my info email address. So I took one of these emails into work to show my friend who runs our network. On looking at the extended mail header, he could tell that the emails were being sent from the same server as the forums are hosted on (matching IP address). Because oddworld.au.com is the default server email address, the spammer must be using the domain name also (or maybe the server puts it in automatically). So with all that mail being sent to and from the server, it's obviously taking the bandwidth and speed and making it slow for us.

Now, this should be illegal ... but apparently if your SMTP (mail server) is set to be an open relay (I think this is the term he used) mail server, then anyone on the internet can use it to send email if they know how. Most mail servers only allow you to send mail from them if you are on the same network, or connected through your ISP. Spammers like to use such mail servers as they can't get in trouble from their ISP or web host for spamming. And it's basically your own fault if you leave your mail server open like this.

So this now leaves us with a problem that only Justin can fix. So Peter is going to try and get in contact with him and hopefully the problem will be fixed sooner rather than later.

For those of you who can't be bothered reading all that... basically some spammer is using the OWF server to send mass amounts of email and it's making the forums run goddamn slow at times.

Abe Babe...