Yesterday I’d been messing around with my server trying to get mail to work. I need to learn how to set up a mail server for a class of mine, and I thought I might as well learn on my own machine; after all, my name at philisha.net would be pretty cool. So I messed around with it, and I found I had some trouble because the permission settings were pretty tight; I couldn’t get it to accept mail from gmail or Biola’s mail server. I finally figured out how to get it to accept mail from anywhere to phil@philisha.net and decided to call it a night.

So then the next day I go around, and it seems like my site is running a little slow. Well, let’s see what’s up…. 100% CPU usage on my server? That’s strange. Whaaait a minute, it’s all the mail server! I’m getting 196 concurrent connections from all over the Internet!

It turns out I had left my permission settings a bit too loose after tweaking them, and left my machine as an open relay. In other words, anybody could send mail from my machine not only to my machine, but to anywhere else. And fifteen or so spam machines were taking advantage of the opportunity, spewing out as much garbage as they could during the night my server was unsecured.

Now I feel kind of dirty…. I don’t know when the spammers discovered my server, but they could have easily sent out millions of messages; it doesn’t take hardly any resources to send them. Well, anyway…. I learned my lesson. It’s not enough to make sure that you can use your system well; you’re not done until you’re sure no one else can use it either.

And now I’ve learned to Really Hate spammers. I’m not sure what would make you twisted enough to try crap like that, but it makes me sick just thinking that there exist people like that. Come on everyone—capital punishment for spammers! It’s the only way to stop it. It’s not like we’d be getting rid of valuable life….