I've had similar experiences. Granted this isn't always the solution, but the times I have investigated something along these lines, I have found a customer, who has a poorly (perhaps intentionally) written formail CGI, which doesn't verify how it got the data to send, or even who its sending to. Some people come along, realize this, and just found themselves a nifty, free remailer, which will pass most spam checking due to the fact that it orginated within the network (provided it targets local recipients).

The first thing I do now, in situations like your own is parse the messages file to see how much mail was pushed in a given time frame and if that correlates with my down time.

Just my .02 USD

/* And the Creator, against his better judgement, wrote man.c */

In reply to Re: CGI Out of Control by l2kashe
in thread CGI Out of Control by katzuma

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.