about mailbomb

E-mail Bomb - In Internet usage, an e-mail bomb is a form of net abuse consisting of sending huge volumes of e-mail to an address in an attempt to overflow the mailbox or overwhelm the server where the email address is hosted in a denial-of-service attack.

Methods of email bombing
There are two methods of perpetrating an e-mail bomb
1. mass mailing
2. list linking


Mass mailing
Mass mailing consists of sending numerous duplicate mails to the same email address. These types of mail bombs are simple to design but their extreme simplicity means they can be easily detected by spam filters.

Email-bombing using mass mailing is also commonly performed as a DDoS attack by employing the use of "zombie" botnets; hierarchical networks of computers compromised by malware and under the attacker's control.

Similar to their use in spamming, the attacker instructs the botnet to send out millions or even billions of e-mails, but unlike normal botnet spamming, the e-mails are all addressed to only one or a few addresses the attacker wishes to flood.
This form of email bombing is similar in purpose to other DDoS flooding attacks.
As the targets are frequently the dedicated hosts handling website and e-mail accounts of a business, this type of attack can be just as devastating to both services of the host.

This type of attack is more difficult to defend against than a simple mass-mailing bomb because of the multiple source addresses and the possibility of each zombie computer sending a different message or employing stealth techniques to defeat spam filters.

List linking

List linking means signing a particular email address up to several email list subscriptions. The victim then has to unsubscribe from these unwanted services manually. In order to prevent this type of bombing, most email subscription services send a confirmation email to a person's inbox when that email is used to register for a subscription.