Okay, everything's back in place.  The server was looping pretty 
much all night, thanks to someone who figured binaries were kewl 
and he'd share them with everyone.

The server is very graceful about ignoring external mailbombs, but it 
has this silly idea that real live users have to be allowed to post to 
the list.

In the good old days, it would just reject too-large posts outright.  
Now it tries to be a little more graceful, and parses them to remove 
any binaries.  That's what it was doing.  All night.  Parsing.  (VB's 
memory management isn't great, shall we say.  So each time it 
went through, it got slower... and slower... and...)

Of course, if it *had* gone through, things would have been worse.  
3MB, times the population of a mailing list, all pushed through a 
33.6 pipe.  Then any bounces that happen (and I guarantee there 
will be some even on a perfectly maintained list, because that will 
push some people over quota) come back (some of them including 
the full message text), and get pushed back out to the listowner.  
Whee.

All together now, in harmony: "Where has all the bandwidth gone, 
long time passing?"


--
Karen J. Cravens  silver@phoenyx.net
The Dog Ate My Sketchbook:  http://silver.phoenyx.net/