fatal errors - headers too large

[Guest]

My client sent a legitimate email from Outlook 2000, cutting and pasting some
800+ addresses in the to: field. She didn't know this was inadvisable, to say
the least. The email went out through their 3rd party smtp server. The email
has been repeatedly sent to the entire distribution list over and over again,
some recipients are calling and complaining of 200+ copies in their inbox. In
other cases the mailer-daemons are rejecting the email due to illegal header
size. My client has received over 6000 bounces so far with no end in sight.

The 3rd party webhosting service Softcom (myhosting.com) claims it's not
their servers that are sending out this flood of spam.

So the question is, is there anything one can do about this situation? Isn't
there some network of adminstrators that communicate about this kind of
event? The headers aren't spoofed, so it should be easy to determine where
the culprit lies.

And I was astonished that Outlook allowed the send, and that the 3rd party
SMTP server didn't even check the header for validity!

Any suggestions would be appreciated. This is, needless to say, a PR
nightmare for my client who has been getting a flood of calls from irate
customers.

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[Peter Foldes]

His ISP can put an end to it. Tell your client to call. Possibility that in that 800 addresses there is on that is a bad one and you can possibly start a loop of sending out over and over again

 

[Guest]

I have been communicating with the ISP for over 6 hours via email. They
claim it's not happnening on their servers. I don't see how it could be
happening anywhere else.

They don't offer phone support, or any phone number for that matter. I
didn't choose this ISP but I can guarantee my client won't be using
myhosting.com by the end of this coming week.