Victim of open relay mail server abuse

As the new system support personnel for our new client, we are face with a scenario handed down by the previous team, a poorly configured Lotus Domino mail server along with a messy network environment.

Studying the setup plus resolving the minor issues all over the network already takes up several days. Nobody knows the administrator passwords because it is not their job to logon to the server and administer it.

They also received a fax from their ISP regarding their server being used for sending out UCEs (Unsolicited Commercial Emails) which we were unable to address immediately because of all the pending issues plus lack of passwords for everything.

Primary user complaint was unable to send out email and not receiving any failure report for these mails.

When we finally manage to get the password to logon to the server we were greeted with a very busy system. The console screen was flying through with text that we were unable to read in time. We have to stop the outbound SMTP service to be even able to start the Domino Server administration client.

Going through the STMP outgoing log, there were 30000 emails either pending delivery or with delivery problems.

Deleting these mails were a real hassle due to the amount of it in the Domino mail.box plus we were still receiving huge amount of connections from these SPAM sending clients.








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