T 5.75 Overload due to incoming e-mails

An email address may be blocked deliberately by continuously sending enormous emails (possibly containing meaningless content). For example, this may occur because a user did not observe netiquette and got on somebody's bad side in so doing or because the organisation is to be attacked. Netiquette (blend of net and etiquette) refers to the rules of politeness, which became standard practice for use of the internet over time, particularly in the news groups, and the observance of which is supposed to ensure that everyone can use the internet efficiently and to everyone's satisfaction.

High data traffic generated deliberately by means of the aforementioned may overload the local email system so that it is rendered inoperative. This may even take on such scale that the provider disconnects the user and/or his/her entire organisation.

A mail system may also be overloaded if the employees participate in email chain letter activities. For example, a chain email at Christmas rendered many IT systems inoperative in the middle of the eighties. Here, users received an email containing Christmas greetings and an appealing graphic and were asked to copy this email and to send it to ten other users.

Mail bombs

The term mail bomb refers to emails containing malicious functions added deliberately. These are normally contained in the email attachments. Such an attachment generates large amounts of subdirectories or requires large amounts of disk space when activated for reading or upon unpacking, for example. In many cases, the targeted overloading of email address with the help of incoming emails containing mostly meaningless content is also referred to as mail bombing.