Email to sg address not getting through

[ScottF4]

I received this error message which did manage to get through. It appears that 102 messages bounced:

Date: 13 Nov 2006 19:01:49 -0000
Message-ID: <1163444509.12493.ezmlm-warn@heapsys.com>
From: "neojupdate-help@heapsys.com"<+neooffice+xxxx+a1645b47c4.neojupdate-help#heapsys.com@spamgourmet.com>
To: neooffice.xxxx@spamgourmet.com
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Subject: ezmlm warning (neooffice: message 18 of 26)

Hello! I am the automatic mailing list manager of the NeoJUpdate mailing list.


Some emails sent to you as a subscriber of NeoJUpdate mailing-list were
returned to me several times. If I can't deliver the current email to you,
you will then receive a final message. If this final email is
returned to me as an error, you will be automatically unsubscribed from
NeoJUpdate mailing-list.



I holded the list of emails of the mailing-list NeoJUpdate which couldn't
be delivered to you.

Here there is the numbers of the emails you didn't received:

102

--- Here there is a copy of the problematic message which was returned to me:

Return-Path: neojupdate-help@heapsys.com<+neooffice+xxxx+a1645b47c4.neojupdate-help#heapsys.com@spamgourmet.com>
Received: (qmail 11520 invoked for bounce); 1 Nov 2006 22:53:16 -0000
Date: 1 Nov 2006 22:53:16 -0000
From: MAILER-DAEMON@heapsys.com
To: neojupdate-return-102-@heapsys.com
Subject: failure notice

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at heapsys.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<neooffice.xxxxxx@spamgourmet.com>:
Sorry, I wasn't able to establish an SMTP connection. (#4.4.1)
I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

[SysKoll]

This might have been when the attack against our server was going full blast. The server's load is lighter now, I am getting email reasonably fast (minutes to a few hours of delay).

Also, on top of the attack against us, there is currently a generalized surge of spam coming from Windows machines infected by spambot viruses that has been affecting a lot of ISP. See the newss alert on http://cbl.abuseat.org/, quoted below:

NEWS ALERT 2006/10/26
Commencing approximately October 22nd, 2006, a large new "bot army" has been detected sending alarming numbers of pump&dump and pharmaceutical spam. Many ISPs are reporting 20-30% increases (and some much larger increases) in spam in a matter of days. Some ISPs appear to be struggling with this load increase, and progressively worsening service disruptions are expected with some ISPs who have difficulty coping with the load.

The CBL is presently tracking almost 300,000 hacked machines sending this junk.

It is believed that these are due to infections by the Stration or Warezov email worms. One or both of which appear to the recipient as an email from their email provider, telling them they have a virus and have to open a contained zip file to "fix the virus". But opening the zip file causes the virus to infect them. One common subject line is "Mail Server Report", another is "hello" with body: "Mail transaction failed. Partial message is available".

So spamgourmet might not be the only culprit here.