Out of Office Spammed Entire Mailbox

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Level 1

15 points

Out of Office Spammed Entire Mailbox

Community,

I wanted to run something by the group that happened at work today. In the end, one of our worker's tried to set an Out of Office Auto Reply, and spammed his entire mailbox, by sending the auto-message as a reply to everyone in his inbox, all the way back to February. While this did not really pose a security breach, (such as forwarding emails to unintentional recipients, or 'Replying All' when it was innapropriate to do so), his rolodex was frantically calling within 5 minutes, asking why they had 40 emails from him.

Embarassing, to say the least.

Let me set the stage:

Operating System: Mac OS 10.8

Client Software: Mac Mail

This is the rule he tried to create.

Account Type: IMAP, syncing an Exchange 2003 (yes, I know, we're poor)

Extraneous: A few auto-reply email setups, such as our Salesforce Case creation, and inter-company email list. I do not think this played a huge role to spark anything, but worth mentioning I suppose.

I took his computer offline, after deleting the Rule in Mail.app, and our IT team took his Active Directory user profile (and by extension, his email privaledges) offline at about the same time. Therefore, I'm not sure which fixed it...

But, here is my logic -

1) the Rule did not leave the computer, because it was an IMAP account. I might understand that incorrectly, but thats what I'm going with.

2) The Computer put the Auto Reply rule into a strange loop, and replied to everyone in the mailbox, until we locked it out

Things I doubt in that simple theory -

1) Does a 2011 iMac have the power to send a couple hundred emails over a 5-10 minute span? If not, does this mean the AUto Reply rule was incorrectly understood by the server?

Any ideas are welcome. I thought it would pose an interesting discussion, as I cant find much about this on the internet.

Thanks,

Charlie

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Aug 14, 2012 5:33 PM

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Answer 1

thomas_r.

Level 7

31,989 points

Aug 14, 2012 7:46 PM in response to cdolan92

When you create a rule in Mail, you are asked if you want to apply the rule to all messages in all selected mailboxes. The default is "Apply." So, when he created the rule, he probably just hit return without reading the message or understanding what he was agreeing to.

BTW, note that setting up auto-replies like this as a Mail rule is bad, as it can easily end up creating an infinite mail loop. (The vacation auto-reply triggers some other auto-reply, which triggers the vacation message again, which triggers the other auto-reply again, and so on, until one or both mailboxes are full.) That sort of thing should be discouraged.

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