COMMAND

    MessageASAP

SYSTEMS AFFECTED

    MessageASAP software

PROBLEM

    Forrest  Aldrich   found  following.    The  popular   MessageASAP
    software has in  it an annoying  bug which can  cause a nice  SMTP
    flood during setup, under the right circumstances.  In this  case,
    Forrest had several  incidents over the  last week where  he began
    receiving hundreds upon hundreds  of relay attempts, by  different
    users and all destined to "smtptest@messageasap.com".  Because  he
    controls relaying ability, nothing could be sent, but logs  filled
    up to very quickly.

    The program appears to perform an MX lookup for the current domain
    you have, and then attempts relaying  off of those MX hosts.    In
    this  case,  running  large  dial  access  pools which are used by
    different  customers,  it  began  spamming  its  own servers.  The
    program doesn't recognize RFC error codes (sent by testing  team),
    so it just keeps going and going....

    One  unfortunate  side  effect  of  this  is,  apart  from wasting
    sysadmin time, is that many people have had their accounts revoked
    due to violations of Acceptable Use Policies.... even though  they
    probably had no idea why.

SOLUTION

    A message has  been sent to  MessageASAP, in hopes  they will code
    better.