Troubleshooting Video Boards

By Jerry Pournelle

October 20, 2003

(Troubleshooting Video Boards :  Page 1 of 1 )

Column 279 (Continued from the Previous Week)

The Spam Swamp

The other day I needed a critical e-mail that should have been sent to Roberta on her Earthlink account. It hadn't come, but it might have, so I decided there was nothing for it: I had to look at her spam files. Earthlink has a new spam filter system; she set it to take out "known spam," and since she was still getting a lot of unwanted solicitations, we hadn't appreciated just what that spam filter was doing.

I found out when I had to look at those filtered messages to be sure the critical one I wanted hadn't been intercepted. It hadn't been. Every single intercepted message was spam pure and simple. There were over 400 of them collected over a two day period: over 200 a day to a single Earthlink mail account. Incidentally, to Earthlink's credit, intercepted spam doesn't count against your mailbox quota. Hurrah.

I just checked my own spam filters: There are 714 over a five day period on my Earthlink account alone. I get far more at my regular e-mail address. Clearly there is enough spam to go around, and then some. So much, in fact, that some are predicting the end of e-mail as we know it. Peter Flynn says it will keep getting worse until we go back to stone tablets.

Consider: Most mail service providers have what used to be thought of as generous limits to the amount of mail you can store before the box fills and all subsequent mail is rejected. Alas, most of those limits were set before the storage revolution sent the price of a gigabyte of storage down to pennies, and service providers haven't caught up with that trend. As a result, mail boxes can fill quickly in a period of Internet worm attacks. Chaos Manor Associate Eric Pobirs reports that his box can be filled in 6 hours during an attack. Others have similar experiences. Spam really is interfering with legitimate mail, not merely by eating the time you need to delete it, but by denying you the chance to get real mail at all.

 Page 1 of 1