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

Coincidence?

[robogun]

The article does not mention the amount of outbound spam from Australia. Which I have been getting a lot of lately. In fact, come to think of it, exactly in the time frame mentioned in the article.

Re:Coincidence?

[__aavhli5779]

I hate to point out that there's at least a bit of irony in Telstra whining about spam bogging down their mail servers.

Though they're definitely not on the level of a true spamhaus, Telstra has been observed over the last few years protecting spammers on their network, including moving IP assignments for said customers to avoid blocklists.

What I can't say is whether pink contracts at Telstra are particularly more rife than, say, those at AT&T, another notorious abuse-ignorant ISP.

Re:Coincidence?

[RT Alec]

I hate to sound like a broken record, but maybe these ISPs need to start seriously thinking about blocking outbound port 25 traffic (except, of course, for their own mail servers).

Please rephrase "How dare you put a limit on my ability to run a mail server!!" to the more appropriate "I want to continue getting away with a business level of service on my consumer priced account". Also, please don't reply about how blocking port 25 will ruin the Internet-- that is not what I suggest.

It's time we all grew up. ISPs need to realize that there is a serious price to pay for allowing spam to proliferate. Yes, it is their fault-- from the infamous "pink contracts" of UUNet, PSI, and others, to the just plain dumb policy of allowing egress TCP port 25 traffic.

Who pays for it?

[Ed Avis]

Perhaps this is the best argument for charging for bandwith usage, or at least the most acceptable to Slashdotters. It gives a financial incentive to people to clean up their systems and stop being easy prey to worms and viruses, and makes them pay for the damage they cause (whether deliberately or just through carelessness and using insecure software).

Ironic advertising...

[Anonymous Coward]

Optus and Telstra published apologies on their websites and on voicemail because of slow delivery times.

Ad below:

Unlimited bandwidth with optus only $49.95 a month

Here is how much spam I get

[Anonymous Coward]

I took the time to set up this script the other day, and being the strange person that I am I also had saved all spam in a separate folder, so was able to graph this going some time back:

http://www.ispol.com/home/grisha/spam.html

it's out of control, that's for sure.

Telstra

[silas_moeckel]

Testra has been the worse offender routing table bloat in the world. Those guys are either clueless or trying to avoid having any backbone while appearing to be one. Telstra's CIRD report these guys are advertising just shy of 30k prefixes and a lot of those are /32 prefixes aka one IP address. Somebody needs to track down whoever calls themselves the network architect, engineer or admin and shoot them then show them how to advertise a prefix.

Oh yea BTW all those entra entries into the global routing table make it harder for every other router running BGP.

Plus an infrastructure problem?

[xixax]

Here's a excerpt from a newspaper article I read this morning that suggests that whacky system design and a patch mentality contributed to the problems:

Sources close to Telstra and its suppliers, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard, said both vendors would come in for a grilling about the software bug, although it was mainly due to a flawed configuration strategy of installing Sun's Netscape mail software on HP hardware.

"Telstra is always bullying behind the scenes and making life very difficult for Sun and HP and Sun-owned Netscape," one source said. "The method has been not to actually fix things but to patch them, and not think about the long term."

Xix.