[unisog] When you really need to blast email

[Michael Hofer]

On Tue, 11 Mar 2008, Michael Holstein wrote:

> Our safety folks are working a campus-wide "emergency notice" system, 
> where one option will be email (the logic behind that is outside the 
> scope of this technical question).
> 
> Yahoo (and others) like to rate-limit email, and we've tried to no avail 
> to remedy this .. usually we get a "421 try again later" (Yahoo). For 
> things like our campus mail digest or notices of a snow day, a 15 minute 
> delay isn't a problem. For something more serious like "stay inside and 
> away from the window", it is.
> 
> My first thought was was to configure a box with multiple virtual IPs 
> (possibly on different subnets) and blast them out in parallel with 
> hopes of staying underneath the "radar" .. by doing multipath routing 
> with Neftilter, for example (since I apparently can't do this with 
> sendmail directly).
> 
> Is there a better approach than this brute-force hack?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Michael Holstein
> Cleveland State University

Seems to me that regardless of the issues behind the desire to do so, you 
want to abuse somebody else's email system -- use it in excess of what 
they wish to allocate to any individual source of email.

If you're trying to warn people ON-campus, wouldn't an easier thing to do 
would be to co-opt all http queries, wherever they're addressed and point 
them at a warning page?  You'd catch people who aren't checking their 
email as well...

Michael Hofer
mhofer at ancientpond.com