Posted: 9/3/2010 11:45:30 AM EDT
| If I send enough emails to a company, will it lock their server up? |
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Are we looking for advice in interfering with the conduct of a business or is this some other other illegal activity? I need to know what to file this under. <hint>  No, I am not trying ti interfere with anything. Besides I am too lazy to try. Its a disussion with a coworker. He claims your cell phone will lock up too if the mailbox gets too full. Not trying to do anything illegal. FWIW the original topic was network speed, do we need more. |
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Quoted: Quoted: Are we looking for advice in interfering with the conduct of a business or is this some other other illegal activity? I need to know what to file this under. <hint> Its a disussion with a coworker. He claims your cell phone will lock up too if the mailbox gets too full He's an idiot. |
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| The phone can have problems depending on if it is a software issue, or how much memory is in the phone. This would have nothing to do with the company email servers, as it is dealing more on the client side. I have had it happen to my iphone but it does not lock up, it just crashes the program. Certainly if the phone were to try to download more than it could handle then it would run out of space and either lock up or crash. |
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It's probably possible, but probably not easily done using only 1 computer. I believe that the typical way that this is done is by distributing malware to unsuspecting computers that allows you remotely control them. With such a "zombie net," you could then direct all of those computers to send as much traffic as possible to whatever the target is.
However, I believe that not only is this quite illegal, but larger companies most likely have extensive measures in place to detect such an attack and block it. Now, all of that being said, it may be a lot easier to do when targeting a cell phone. My Droid sometimes hangs for a while if I open too many ARFCOM threads.  Maybe it's just the particular Android version that I'm running or something...
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Quoted:
The phone can have problems depending on if it is a software issue, or how much memory is in the phone. This would have nothing to do with the company email servers, as it is dealing more on the client side. I have had it happen to my iphone but it does not lock up, it just crashes the program. Certainly if the phone were to try to download more than it could handle then it would run out of space and either lock up or crash. It goes without a hitch.. Friday PM hours everything slows down tremendously, which tends to be the busy time.. I noticed it when all the phone lines are active too.. all of them are on the network. We have something slowing things down. It has shut down twice in the past year |
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Quoted:
The phone can have problems depending on if it is a software issue, or how much memory is in the phone. This would have nothing to do with the company email servers, as it is dealing more on the client side. I have had it happen to my iphone but it does not lock up, it just crashes the program. Certainly if the phone were to try to download more than it could handle then it would run out of space and either lock up or crash. This. If I don't purge my inbox my phone may not crash, but it runs slow as molasses. |
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If the e-mail is flowing across a WAN circuit, you'll saturate the circuit long before you can touch the local resources on any decent mail server. Besides, slamming the mail server shouldn't cause it to "shut down." It may be unavailable for end users, but it should queue what it can, drop what it can't handle, and keep on chugging. |
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Yep, we've had clients with 1,000,000+ messages in queue (open relay configuration) & Exchange just slows down.....alot. You won't crash it - it may take days for mail to go through, but it won't crash.
You could, theoretically, if it wasn't configured properly send enough to fill the disk which would cause a crash, but that would be a *lot* of mail |
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I manage the alert and monitoring solution for our IT infrastructure.
I accidentally sent 300,000 emails in about 4 seconds too our exchange cluster. Cluster freaked out and rolled to the other node causing a few minutes of outage. It all depends on how the system is designed and what load it is designed for. Now, phones locking up from too much email is another issue. Depending on how the phone manages a memory full event, it might lock or or you might just not get any more emails. |