Designing attacks for SMTP servers

Abstract

Electronic mail is today's most widely used method of communication. In recent years, if e-mail had not been there, communication would not have been possible. Because of SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is an old communication protocol used for electronic mail. It has various bugs arising from its design. In this study, several malicious attacks which can be made on the SMTP protocol have been investigated and classified. Various forms of software have been developed in Visual Basic 6.0 to deal with these attacks. Finally we have tried to suggest some rules for preventing these attacks. The results were examined and measures to be taken explained.