MIT e-mail servers under attack

For the past couple of days, somebody has been sending vast amounts of "malicious" e-mail to people with MIT e-mail accounts, bringing the system to its knees as the school tries to block the problem.

MIT first reported a problem shortly before 1 p.m. yesterday, and said it had a fix in place:

MIT's email configuration has been modified to accept externally sourced email via a third party spam filtering provider (MIcrosoft) to mitigate the high load, and mail should begin to be delivered normally. Mail that had been queued externally is expected to be delivered over the course of the next 1-2 hours.

But shortly after 10 p.m., MIT reported it was still getting complaints about slow mail delivery from non-MIT addresses.

Around 11:30 this morning, MIT's alumni department reported:

MIT's central IT department (IS&T) has identified another issue with a large quantity of malicious incoming email this morning that is causing delayed email delivery. They are working to get this resolved as quickly as possible.

In response to our own Ron Newman (an institute alum), the alumni department added this afternoon:

MIT IS&T is currently actively working on a solution, but we don't have an estimate yet on when service will return to normal.