86 Mail
[insert theme from Dragnet]The story you are about to read is true. The names have not been
changed so as to finger the guilty.It was early evening, on a Monday. I was working the swing shift out
of Engineering Computer Operations under the command of Richard
Herndon. I don’t have a partner.While I was reading my e-mail that evening, I noticed that the load
average on apple.com, our VAX-8650, had climbed way out of its
normal range to just over 72.Upon investigation, I found that thousands of Internet hosts^7 were
trying to send us an error message. I also found 2,000+ copies of this
error message already in our queue.I immediately shut down the sendmail daemon which was offering
SMTP service on our VAX.I examined the error message, and reconstructed the following
sequence of events:We have a large community of users who use QuickMail, a popular
Macintosh based e-mail system from CE Software. In order to make
it possible for these users to communicate with other users who have
chosen to use other e-mail systems, ECO supports a QuickMail to
Internet e-mail gateway. We use RFC822 Internet mail format, and
RFC821 SMTP as our common intermediate r-mail standard, and we
gateway everything that we can to that standard, to promote interop-
erability.The gateway that we installed for this purpose is MAIL*LINK
SMTP from Starnine Systems. This product is also known as
GatorMail-Q from Cayman Systems. It does gateway duty for all of
the 3,500 QuickMail users on the Apple Engineering Network.Many of our users subscribe, from QuickMail, to Internet mailing
lists which are delivered to them through this gateway. One such(^7) Erik identifies these machines simply as “Internet hosts,” but you can bet your
cookies that most of them were running Unix.