16 Oct 2006
Email Servers Will Choke, Says Spamhaus

SPAMYesterday, from midnight to midnight, I received over 850 SPAM messages. In that same period, I received less than 100 legitimate emails, mostly from mailing lists.

If the spammers win, email will become useless. Like Usenet. And that would be a disaster for all of us - business, government and individuals.

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.

(link) [Slashdot]

07:43 /Technology | 2 comments | permanent link