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University Capitulates, Switches Off Spam Filters

Posted by timothy on from the spammers-should-be-castrated dept.

Heraklit writes "As reported on German news site Heise, the system administrators of the Technical University of Braunschweig have temporarily given up the fight against spam. Because of the legal obligation to deliver all mail and of the delay time exceeding critical 5 days(!), they decided to switch off all filter mechanisms. Before, the 20 servers dedicated to processing e-mail alone had been breaking down under a load of 100000 unprocessed mail messages, ca. 98% of which had been spam or viruses. ... A similar e-mail jam occurred recently at the IT central of the German Federal Government. Is this the beginning of the end of e-mail?" (The Fish may be useful.)

6 of 470 comments (clear)

  1. I wonder... by BeneathTheVeil · · Score: 5, Funny

    what sort of awful sound the servers made as soon as the filters were turned off? ...I imagine it would be akin to someone who 'just' made it in a mad dash to the bathroom.

    1. Re:I wonder... by Drooling+Iguana · · Score: 5, Funny

      Have you seen Ghostbusters? Remember when the environmentalist guy shut down their containment unit?

      Same thing.

      --
      ... I'm addicted to placebos
  2. Re:20 servers for only 100,000 messages? by EvilGrin666 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I bet they run exchange.

  3. Re:It's done. by shadow_slicer · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Adding some numbers (*sigh*) helps guard against random address guessing."

    Exactly! That's why I require all my users to use multi-case letters, symbols and numbers as their email address. I also require them to change the address every couple of weeks to a value different than any previous value (in case some spammer has managed to brute force it, or the user has leaked it). This has practically eliminated spam and reduced the mail server's storage usage by 99.9% (though the mail server still has to work really hard sending all those 550's).

  4. Re:Question? by dont_think_twice · · Score: 5, Funny

    Does anybody know the filtering methods they were using before they decided to toss everything to wind?

    They had a team of 20 monkeys that would read the emails and determine if they were spam. Unfortunately, the monkeys are easily distracted, so anytime they got spam about banannas, they would lose focus. This lead to the backlog.

    What? you have never gotten bananna spam before?

  5. Re:20 servers for only 100,000 messages? by dj245 · · Score: 5, Funny
    How in the world could this place possibly need 20 servers to process this much mail?!

    1 server processes spam, 1 processes viruses, 1 is a DNS server. The other 17 process data for the SETI@home German team.

    --
    Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.