Today we had an interesting issue on a client site – the client runs SBS 2003 – they sent out an email blast to 60 of THEIR customers but they mistakenly put everyone in the cc line instead of the bcc line. What then happened was a deluge of emails that bounced back to them and continues even now. Our IT team immediately checked out our clients SBS server and could not see a problem, until we realised that the mail was coming from one of their customers servers. We investigated and the based ont he MX records, it gave us the impression that the clients customer was using the POP3 connector. So we figured it was linked back to the now infamouse POP3 connector patch http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=7B1FF109-092E-4418-AA37-A53AF7B8F6FC&displaylang=en I then spoke with the IT Guy that was looking after the clients customer – his response was “They should be right as they have automatic updates turned on”. His belief was that the customers server was fine with just Automatic Updates turned on. Depending on the media you installed SBS from, you may find that your not covered. Automatic Updates in the original pre SP1 versions of SBS 2003 just ensure that the Operating system is patched – it does not take into account all the other components of SBS such as Exchange Server, the POP3 connector or ISA server. The issue we have here is that Microsoft fail to understand that this issue exists and they fail to do anything about resolving it for older software. That my friends is bad. Sure, in the next version of SBS 2003 – SBS 2003 R2 (or SBS Version that shalt not be named) it’s all sorted with the total integration like never before of WSUS, but Microsoft need to make it much more clear to the IT Pro’s out there just what is and is NOT patched by Windows Update, Automatic Updates and Microsoft Update. The way that we can handle it on our SBS servers is to visit the Microsoft Update site and use Microsoft Updates once, this will “flip the bits” that will ensure that future Automatic Updates will include the additional Exchange, SBS and ISA component. Had the IT Guy done this then we would not have this problem right now. Fingers crossed that he deals with this quickly now.
Update – just recieved email that he’s applied the MS POP3 patch very quickly (in fact within an hour of being told) so things should settle down quickly now.