Spam Slows Australian Net Traffic

JohnPM writes "A sudden, sustained surge in traffic has slowed Australian email drastically over the past week. Spam and computer viruses are believed to be largely responsible."

Comments

Spam ruins networks; here's what spammers think

[bigberk]

It's nice to increasingly see these types of news stories reported in the media. It impresses upon people the cost of spam -- administrative expense, increased bandwidth usage, lost productivity, etc.

Yet would you believe that spammers themselves think they're not doing anything wrong? Many of them, like this guy think they're legitimate business people. They think there is nothing immoral, destructive, or un-neighborly about spam.

And you think it's just a weird coincidence that virus traffic and spam are both on the rise? This lends more credibility to the growing concern among mail administrators, myself included, that spammers are setting up major worldwide spam injection networks using viruses.

Email Providers vs. Bandwidth Providers

[billstewart]

This story does appear to be about a couple of big Aussie email providers, and how their email servers are getting bogged down. Telstra and Optus are also IP bandwidth providers, but that's really a separate issue, and the article didn't say their pipes were getting bogged down (except maybe the pipes into their email servers.) Much different scale, much different set of problems and solutions.

If their usual 30 million messages/day goes up 20%, and the average message is 10 KB, that's an extra 60GB/day (* 8bits/byte / 86400 sec/day) -> 5.5 megabits/second. So they need an extra 3 E1 lines, or half a slow Ethernet. In practice they'd need more, because it's not spread out evenly across the day, but it shouldn't be killing them.

Now, Telstra always had the reputation of being the developed world's most data-clueless telco, with a stupidity and greed level similar to the US cable modem companies.... But even so, this shouldn't be that much strain on them as a bandwidth provider.