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Story URL: http://software.silicon.com/security/0,39024655,39118033,00.htm

Leader: It's worse than a virus and more annoying than spam
That's right it's the 'Mail Delivery Failure Notification'...

By silicon.com

Published: Wednesday 28 January 2004

Whoever came up with the mail delivery failure notification - you are officially persona non grata in thousands of offices worldwide.

Whenever a virus comes along many businesses are ready for it - blocking it, quarantining it or obliterating it as it enters the building. What they aren't ready for - or even able to cope with - are the thousands of email delivery failure notifications which occur as a side-effect of email address spoofing and other people's servers rejecting them.

Every day at the moment, in the wake of the MyDoom outbreak, companies are processing vast quantities of email telling them 'your email could not be delivered because it contained a virus' or similar.

But it didn't. You didn't send a virus but now you're picking up the bill - lost bandwidth, wasted man hours and general 'pain in the arse' factor - for somebody else's woefully unintuitive technology.

Surely this mechanism has had its day. How many do you see that are relevant? Most are the by-product of a virus or similar network problem and in truth the only people to benefit are the virus writers. Even if their malicious creation doesn't get past the first line of defence they can be sure the ensuing delivery failure traffic will be tantamount to a denial of service attack on servers worldwide.

Genuine email gets backed-up for days, employees become frustrated and businesses grind to a frustrating go-slow.

Companies won't filter it or block it - because there's no distinguishing between such notifications and genuine notifications of a failed mail. It won't be swept away with the spam and employees who are forced to trawl through these messages lest an important email has genuinely not been delivered will lose hours each day during a time of heavy 'infection'.

In short, the mail delivery failure notification is becoming one of the biggest network-borne menaces of the modern age. Sounds extreme? If you haven't experienced this then that will sounds a preposterous claim but if you have then you'll know exactly what we are talking about.

It's time this functionality was switched off - at least for several days either side of virus outbreaks such as this week's. Go on - do it, for all our sakes.