Symptoms:

This is an incident report for the email issue that occured on 17th April 2009. Our outgoing email servers were used by a customer to send spam/advertisements since 12midnight today. This resulted in a large queue on the email server which delayed outgoing email sending for all our customers on the server. By 9am this morning, this queue was still not cleared and we had to step in to forcefully purge the related emails from our outgoing servers.

Resolution:

Due to the processing required to sift through each email in our server queue to determine which emails were sent from the customer and which were from other customers, there was a delay in email processing between 9am and 10:30am for us to purge the spam/advertisements from our server. As of 10:30am, outgoing email operations were restored to normal.

Updated: 17-04-2009 12:09pm SGT