SBS2000
Over the weekend my customer told me that they could not collect email,
(using POP3). The server was also running low on drive C drive space so I
assumed it was an issue with that. However visiting them yesterday &
checking with their ISP (Demon) it seems that they had a email DOS attack.
Demon support said that there were over 25,000 emails waiting to download &
pointed out that we would never download that many emails by 56k modem.
Demon then deleted all the DOS emails which were addressed to the
postmaster. The postmaster account is not allocated to a user on the
Exchange server, so I assume that it would just bounce them after processing
the mail download.
What appears to have been happening is that the POP3 collector would attempt
to download the emails & each time, after several hours (or days) the POP3
collection would fail. As it was POP mail, all the mail would remain on
Demon's mailservers & also Exchange would not process any of the mails that
it had already downloaded as a complete POP collection had not occurred.
This seems to have made exchange store some sort of temp download file on
the Exchange drive & had eaten all the disk space. How do I free up the disk
space caused by this? I cannot find any obvious place for this file.
After Demon deleted the DOS emails, we ran a successful POP3 download which
I was able to check using Demon's webmail facility (the mailbox had emails
before I synch'd the email & afterwards it was empty). However although
Exchange server has downloaded the new emails, it has not processed them &
delivered to the clients. Could this be a problem with some huge temp file
sitting somewhere?
Regards
Nick