Mail Bombing

Email "bombing" is characterized by abusers repeatedly sending an identical email message to a particular address.

Email "spamming" is a variant of bombing; it refers to sending email to hundreds or thousands of users (or to lists that expand to that many users). Email spamming can be made worse if recipients reply to the email, causing all the original addressees to receive the reply. It may also occur innocently, as a result of sending a message to mailing lists and not realizing that the list explodes to thousands of users, or as a result of an incorrectly set-up responder message (such as vacation(1)).

Email bombing/spamming may be combined with email "spoofing" , which alters the identity of the account sending the email), making it more difficult to determine who the email is actually coming from.

If you provide email services to your user community, your users are vulnerable to email bombing and spamming.
Email spamming is almost impossible to prevent because a user with a valid email address can "spam" any other valid email address, newsgroup, or Message forum service.
When large amounts of email are directed to or through a single site, the site may suffer a denial of service through loss of network connectivity, system crashes, or failure of a service because of
overloading network connections
using all available system resources
filling the disk as a result of multiple postings and resulting syslog entries

If your system suddenly appears sluggish (email is slow or doesn't appear to be sent or received), the reason may be that your mailer is trying to process a large number of messages.
Reaction

Identify the source of the email bomb/spam and configure your router (or have your Network Service Provider configure the router) to prevent incoming packets from that address.
Review email headers to determine the true origin of the email and do as you see fit :o)

Unfortunately for Sephiroth and JasonSensation, there is no way to prevent email bombing or spamming (other than disconnecting from the Internet), and it is impossible to predict the origin of the next attack.

I will provide some the best mail bombing tools for download very soon for "educational purposes" of course:o)

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