email hack

[Whiskerfish]

So somehow our server got hacked by a couple of spam generators. In roughly the last 72 hours we sent out over 330,000 spam emails (yes three hundred and thirty thousand!). As of about noon today It has been shut down. A full scan of our system has been done by our server company and no malicious code has been discovered. So we still do not know exactly how it happened. We changed some of the permissions on the ngwclub postmaster email server and that seems to have closed the door to them. The actual spam was coming out of Brazil and Poland and they were using our server as a relay.

The damage from this is to our "Reputation" as a legitimate email server. This is a very fickle thing. Once a email company say AT&T or Google or whoever detects that level of spam they shut you down from sending email to their clients and it takes a lot of Hoop jumping to get back in their good graces. In the mean time they will just reject our emails to their clients.

I am not seeing a bunch of rejections but I do expect that as a possibility. This may take some time to develop fully.

If you feel like you are not receiving the proper notifications to your subscribed threads please let me know. I do have the ability to identify individually rejected emails but I have to go looking for them.

We will attempt to fix things as they come up but please be patient. I am just a dumb helicopter mechanic and this is a bit deep for me