We recently had a user send out an email to a huge list of very badly
formatted emails (Random quotes, semicolons, commas instead of
semi-colons, spaces in emails, double quotes round blocked of 10+
emails, angled brackets all over the place, duplicate recipients etc).
Unfortunately no one was told about this until after it had been sent.
The To: header alone contained around 1200 email addresses. Aside from
the obvious data protection issues, method of mass mail, amount of
recipients in to field, is there anyway this alone could break an MTA?
The reason I ask is because numerous recipients of this e-mail have
received not one but 200-300 copies of the same email.
Internally we use Exchange which then sends onto an Exim box which
relays out to our smart host (Postini) who virus/spam check each mail. I
can not see in any of the logs (exchange, exim) the e-mail going out
multiple times.
The thing that gets even weirder is that I've spoken to a couple of very
annoyed customers and managed to get them to forward back the headers of
their emails. Our company's mail servers do not appear anywhere in the
headers. I've spoken to 4 different people and all 4 sets of headers
look similar. Sometimes it appears as though duplicate headers have been
added somewhere in the middle (one set had around 8 lots of
X-Virus-Scanned headers). The last few sets of e-mails appear to have
originated through Demon's (or one of their customers maybe) mail
servers.
I added an Exim filter which says send me any message from the original
user with a specific word in the subject directly to me. I have since
received a few copies of this email myself (The user placed her email
address in the to field also)! Upon checking our Exchange server I can
see the message didn't come from there. It's header show the first
server as
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denied by domain of twi.co.uk) client-ip=194.217.242.90;
envelope-from=deborah.pullen@???;
helo=anchor-post-32.mail.demon.net;
I have attached a full header as received from an annoyed customer. I
know people hate it when you obfuscate logs so I've left MOST of it
alone. The only bits I've removed are the customers email addresses
contained in the to field.
Attached are 2 sets of headers. 1st set are headers from a customer, 2nd
set are the headers I received after the Exim server received the email
and forwarded the email to me.
Thanks for any and all help
--
Gareth Hastings
Return-Path: <deborah@???>
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