[news.config] MAIL to Internet

rick@seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams) (11/04/88)

Mail (and news probably) to and from the Internet will be delayed
indefinitely.

The virus that has infected many of the Internet machines has caused
many sites to totally disconnect from the Internet as a preventitive
measure (usually too late!). In addition, the mailbridges that link the
ARPANET to MILNET have been disconnected.

So far the virus has not done any "real" damage, but the indirect costs
of people trying to erradicate it, etc are already incalcuably high.

The virus seems to be totally dependent on TCP for transmission, so
UUCP only sites should not have to worry about it.

The virus seems to only infect vaxes running BSD and Sun-3s.  (Yes it
is all over Sun Microsystems internally as well, since they are on the
Internet.) 

uunet has not been infected (It's a Sequent so the virus doesn't take)
However, uunet (and possibly the bitnet gateways) will probably be
bouncing mail because it can't connect to the disconnected
Internet sites. uunets mailqueue is already 5 times larger than
normal.

---rick