Service outage 11/25 PM into early AM 11/26

[email_support]

We were subjected to a DNS amplification DDoS last night from just before midnight thru about 3AM EST. That made email/webmail/website/etc unreachable. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[DavidT]

I'm just now discovering that things were worse than just "unreachable" back during this attack/outage. During that window, someone tried to send a very important email communication to my wife (at an address that gets automatically forwarded to her CESMail mailbox), and instead of simply not being able to connect and then waiting to redeliver later, this is what resulted--the sender got backscatter from CESMail:

Date: 25 Nov 2012 18:22:54 -0000

From: MAILER-DAEMON[at]filter8.cesmail.net

To: [redacted][at][redacted].net <- this was the sender

Subject: failure notice

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at filter8.cesmail.net.

I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.

This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<[redacted][at]cesmail.net>:

Aack, child crashed. (#4.3.0)

I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

While it's good that the sender received some kind of clue that the message didn't get to my wife, it also revealed my wife's unpublished CESMail address, and the puzzled sender didn't know what to make of this.