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

This Just In

[Bistronaut]

UPDATE: Officials have tracked down the actual source of the problem. It turns out that Slashdot was linking to stories in the .au domain.

</obviousjoke>

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.

Serves them right!

[docbrown42]

If they would have installed the patch that MS has been emailing to EVERYONE , they wouldn't have this problem!

By the way: has anyone noticed Windows being particularly unstable recently? (More than usual)
</noob>

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.