Spam slows down ISP

According to stuff.co.nz, yesterday it took up to 24 hours for Xtra to get an email to its destination because its servers are so clogged with junk.

That is the same length of time it takes New Zealand Post to get a snail mail to an address in the same town.

A spokesperson for Xtra said the problem was temporary and seemed to be caused by a dramatic increase in junk email and email.

She expected the backlog to be cleared over night, but noted that email traffic had doubled in the past three months, with spam (junk emails) and viruses responsible for up to 60 per cent of the extra load.

Apparently the company has filters to make sure that viruses did not get through, but spam was a different matter.

The company had splashed out and bought some more servers over the weekend and was planning to buy more.

She added that ISPs through-out the world were facing this problem and it was not unique to her company.

Um. don't other ISPs have a spam filtering service? µ