Email Servers Will Choke, Says Spamhaus

Rub3X writes, "The legal battle between antispam organization Spamhaus and e360 Insight is heating up. Spamhaus has a user base of around 650 million, and its lists block some fifty billion spam emails per day, according to the project's CEO Steve Linford. Spamhaus CIO Richard Cox says the immediate issue is that if the domain is suspended, the torrent of bulk mail hitting the world's mail servers would cause many of them to fail. More than 90% of of all email is now spam, Cox says, and he doubts that servers worldwide would be able to handle a ten-fold increase in traffic." Others estimate Spamhaus's blocking efficacy as closer to 75%; by this metric spam would increase four-fold, not ten-fold, if Spamhaus went unavailable. The article paraphrases CIO Cox as saying that the service will continue "even if there is a short-term degradation."

Comments

A day without spamhaus

[www.sorehands.com]

After the failed attempt of the illegal alien crowd to shut down the USA by telling immigrants to march on one day (they don't differentiate between illegal and legal), Spamhaus should try the same.

Have spamhaus pick a day and time to report empty lists from 9am to 11:59am on a Monday. Then lets see what Congress and the FTC says.

The FTC issued a report (http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2005/06/adv1.htm) claiming that labelling spam would not be as effective as filters. If the idiots at the FTC and in Washington would feel the effect of spamhuas being down for a few hours.

Mandatory labelling os spam is effective. It would cut net traffic and processing time for some of the spam and make it easier to prosecute the illegal spammers.

I have many thoughts on the legal issues, but Steve Linford said not to discuss those as they may give the spammers idea. I will respect that.