The Talk Place

Blogs with inside information and personal opinions from GRN members around the world

When the email stops...

David Miller - Wednesday 14 May 2008

My director walked over to my desk and asked that question feared by all IT support folk, "Is here something wrong with the Internet? My email won't send." He was trying to reply to an email from a friend in one of the recent disaster areas in Asia.

A few quick checks showed that our ADSL line was operational, as was the USA internet connection, so what was happening?

So I tried to send my self an email to an external account. Yep - it bounced, and I had a reason. Our US mail server had got detected by a monitoring network as sending spam. This network is used by many (including my own email server) to try and stop the deluge of spam. By checking the network's web site, sure enough our IP address was listed.

And our daily prayer time had just started...

I quickly emailed a couple of the IT guys in the US, skyped one, didn't get a response and took a look at the email logs. Oh, this was going to take a while.

Well, I thought, its broken now, it will probably take a while to sort out what the trigger was and fix it and the help of the guys in the US would be helpful, and the prayer time has started.

This needed prayer - so the obvious thing was to go upstairs and join the prayer time.

We prayed about many parts of the GRN work, including the mail problem.

By the time I returned to my desk, one of the US guys was online and was looking at the problem. Together we setup some firewall rules to block outgoing traffic which might have caused the problem (it was probably a 'guest') and we trolled the email logs looking for culprits. It mostly likely came from a virus or botnet infection on a machine connected to the US network. We got the block removed and things gradually returned to normal.

It was interesting timing. Would I have so easily taken the matter to God in prayer if it hadn't been prayer time?