The Eye of Kris

This week, I added an antivirus program to my mail server. Unfortunately, the antivirus program did not work as smoothly as described. It started by scanning e-mails as they came in, and then (for some reason) generating an error message about each one. It would then send that error message to me in an e-mail, which, before going to my mailbox, would be scanned for viruses and generate a new error message...

After a few hours of this, it was brought to my attention that no e-mails sent to or from my server were getting delivered. I checked the mail system, and found 350,000 e-mails in the "queue", caught in an endless loop that would not allow them to go anywhere.

Fortunately, I caught it early, and was able to remove the antivirus program and stop the build-up of messages that would have eventually filled up my disk and made the whole system unusable. I still had to wait almost a full day for the queue to finally clear, and I had to set up a spam filter to delete the hudreds of thousands of error messages that were being sent to me.

All in all, it was an interesting day.