OT: Paging Email Coding Experts

greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread

Does anyone out there know enough about email systems at megasites to take a guess at how many emails it would take to clog a system like eBay? Their announcements board recently had a message that they were experiencing an email server slow down because of a rash of letters sent to them concerning the reserve price auctions issue (see semi-flaming thread about shills a few below this one). They said that they had received several hundred emails. Is that really ALL it takes to bog down a system as large as eBay, Yahoo, etc.?

-- CD (CDOKeefe@aol.com), August 27, 1999

Answers

CD,

I doubt a few hundred messages would clog a system, but it might be more than they can humanly respond to in a short amount of time. It's actually VERY EASY to flood a mail server but if the sys admins know what they are doing it's also easy to block/filter/catch the malicous sender/messages.

-TECH32-

-- TECH32 (TECH32@NOMAIL.COM), August 27, 1999.


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