My mother and mother-in-law are presently experiencing the consequences of a huge influx of (mostly Russian-sent) spam e-mail. According to a recent story at CNN, nine out of 10 e-mails are now spam. Just amazing. Say “Hello” to the botnet.
The effects of this flood vary. My mom’s ISP expresses the problem thusly:
Since Monday we have been under constant barrage by a spamming ‘botnet’ that has overwhelmed our filters, causing lengthy delivery delays. We are receiving messages faster than they can be scanned and delivered, which has queued up messages for days to come. There is not an easy solution here. Ultimately we may disable spam and virus scanning, but the sudden influx of spam and virii could really mess up our mailserver.
She’s seeing up to a 24-hour delay in sending and receiving messages. Georgie’s ISP seems to be handling the load a bit better, but that’s because they’re doing less to filter the spam as it comes in. So, you have two choices: Try to stop the spam at the server and totally bog everything down, or be a little more lax with the filters and let the end user see more spam messages.
I admit to feeling a bit removed from all this. I’m getting over 1,000 spam e-mails a month in my gmail account, but their filters are darn good, so I see maybe two of those; the rest go straight to the spam folder and await deletion. I’m sure Google’s servers are being taxed as much or more than most others out there, and I don’t want to know how they’re doing such a great job at fighting spam. I do know that the only companies who have a chance of stemming this tide of junk are the ones with lots and lots of hardware and lots and lots of money to spend on filters. Sadly, the ISPs my mom and Georgie use are not among those companies.
The other nice thing about Gmail is that you also get a Google Talk account, which lets you instant message (AKA “IM,” Georgie) with other Gmail users. Your IM conversations get automagically stored in your messages archive, so you can go back and access them just as you would a saved e-mail. Best of all, the service is free (as in beer). I wish everyone used it.