Forum Email Hacked

[Thunderfall]

Thanks for the suggestion. However, our guest permissions for "Can Use Email to Friend" was set to "No."

[man1c]

Make sure "send to friend" is disabled for guests, I forgot on one of my sites a few months back and within a few days 100,000's of spam mails were going through it.

[Thunderfall]

Thanks for the advice. I suspected that such was the case.

[Mark.B]

vBulletin simply uses the server to send email. It has no email sending functionality of its own.

Your hosts need to look to their own set up, not try to blame third party scripts that they obviously don't understand.

[Thunderfall]

Our forum uses VB 3.8.2, php 5.3.13, and MySQL 5.0.95. We are hosted on a Linux server running Apache 2.2.20. For quite some time, our server hosts have disabled email notifications and other email functions for our site. The reason they disabled email is because it was being used to send spam. They believe that we need to upgrade our version of vBulletin to prevent the email spam. We plan to upgrade, but not right away. I've searched for other boards that have a similar problem, but can't find any information.

Question: Is this problem likely to have been caused by using an outdated version of VB? If not, can I suggest some other solution? Thanks.