Microsoft 'blacklists' Oxford University in accidental 'spam' overload
Summary: Oxford University managed to accidentally overflow Windows Live services, triggering Microsoft's anti-spam technologies, resulting in the university being 'blacklisted'.
World leading college, the University of Oxford, has suffered an email outage, causing all outbound email sent to Windows Live accounts to bounce back.
The university's service update pages points the problem to Microsoft triggering a series of counter-spam measures, after a university department 'misconfigured' a mailing list last week. Over a million messages destined for Microsoft's services, including Windows Live and Hotmail, pushed Microsoft to enact automatic preventative measures to prevent its own systems from crumbling.
The side effects were felt, as describes the Oxford OUCS support pages:
"This meant that mail sent to any domains for which the Hotmail servers handle mail was being rejected. It also caused a worse side-effect (manifesting itself as a mail loop, in some cases rapidly filling the Nexus mailbox) for anyone who had set their Nexus [internal student email] account to forward their email to such addresses."
As a result, the university mitigated damage by trapping any email destined for a hotmail.com, hotmail.co.uk, live.com, and msn.com email addresses in their servers, creating a massive backlog of emails waiting to be sent.
The trap does not affect regional Windows Live domains, however, allowing students and staff to send email to other countries associated with Windows Live.
By this point, Microsoft had automatically 'blacklisted' Oxford's domain names, in measures normally enacted by spam-producing domains, only days after the initial email error. Oxford has been working with Microsoft to unblock the domain from email servers, to restore normal functioning email sending to Windows Live domains.
Oxford believes that the blacklist has now been removed, which should allow emails to be released from the university's servers -- but in batches as to not overflow the system again and trigger repeat anti-spam countermeasures. Leading nearly into a week since the disruption, email should now begin to be delivered.
Oxford University is to conduct a "full investigation" to determine how a department "caused such disruption" at a critical time of year, just as the new academic session was starting.
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Talkback
Which is it?
"triggering Microsoft???s anti-spam technologies"
and then you write:
"pushed Microsoft to enact automatic preventative measures to prevent its own systems from crumbling."
So were these anti-spam measures or can MS not handle a million email messages?
I assume you can think for yourself instead of trolling
Since this was a mailing list, one can assume that the scenario is 1 sender to 1,000,000 recipients.
Since this ratio is bigger than any corporation (who has more than thousands of employees let alone millions?), or number of Facebook friends a person has, or business contacts a company has.... I'd be curious what rudimentary spam criteria you'd assign.
Regardless of whether is was an accident on the part of Oxford, the resulting emails *were* spam.
RE: Microsoft 'blacklists' Oxford University in accidental 'spam' overload
"Since this was a mailing list, one can assume that the scenario is 1 sender to 1,000,000 recipients."
It was ~9,000 recipients spread over hotmail,gmail,aol,yahoo who apparently had requested a certain publication. The list got into a loop overnight when people discovered replying to the list went back out to all recipients (oh dear).
Hotmails block was put in the day after the incident, for a week.
gmail,aol and yahoo put in rate based blocks at the actual time of the incident and dropped them off the same day when the issue was fixed.
RE: Microsoft 'blacklists' Oxford University in accidental 'spam' overload
RE: Microsoft 'blacklists' Oxford University in accidental 'spam' overload
RE: Microsoft 'blacklists' Oxford University in accidental 'spam' overload
How is the system crappy when Microsoft's software did what its supposed to? Everything worked the way it should have. Problem was within Oxford University not Microsoft.
RE: Microsoft 'blacklists' Oxford University in accidental 'spam' overload
Wow...you are way offbase here man. BTW, it wasnt 'a college student' bringing down MS system? Read the article, an employee misconfigured a mailing list which caused this issue. What would you have Microsoft do, let millions of unnecessary emails into their system, potentially slowing it down? And ofcourse you will be the first person then to point out how MS doenst have any system to stop such a thing.
You cannot have it both ways sir!!
It does not require a diploma from Oxford University
to see that you do not understand the subject matter being discussed.
If you did, you would not have written that which you did.
:|
RE: Microsoft 'blacklists' Oxford University in accidental 'spam' overload
I will concede that I dont understand the subject matter if you care to explain?
Writing snarky comments about Oxford Diploma doesnt make you sound any wiser. If you think I am off-base i request you to enlighten me with your wisdom.....or do us a favor and keep your mouth shut
Distribution list within a distribution list
This was a USER error for sure - and the MS response was correct - project the bigger environment from the smaller.
That is how LOTS of computer systems / damage control systems work - isolate the problem to protect the rest of the network.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
A logical approach. :|
Or the one.