A group of Internet providers have essentially shut down California hosting service, McColo, yesterday and total spam production dropped considerably. The provider, notorious for their low-down ways, was producing 2/3 of the spam in the U.S. Other providers saw a drop from about 40 spam messages per second to 10 per second – a major victory for those whose m3mb3rz are already rock solid.
Another drop happened in September with the demise of Intercage but levels rose again as the spammers headed to McColo. It’s obvious that this minor shut-down won’t effect us all in the long term, but feel free to thank the Internet gods for allowing you at least a brief respite from this horrible scourge. Anti-spam service provider IronPort says
Bhandari said he expects the spam volume to recover to normal levels in about a week, as the spam operations that were previously hosted at McColo move to a new home.
“We’re seeing a slow recovery,” Bhandari. “We fully expect this to recover completely, and to go into the highest ever spam period during the upcoming holiday season.”
Spam is really popular here in hawaii,
btw you should use disqus
They are just one more shell company away from getting back to the business. We will have to learn to live with them or start using otherinbox.com
Just wanted to say that picture is fantastic
Agree.
couldn’t they have shut it down nearer to christmas so we could haeva spell over the busy
Pay them money not to Spam. It will be cheaper for ISPs and users, and will make more money for the Spammers than they make now!
Commoditizing Spam!
After hearing this, I have been keeping an eye on the amount of spam I get and haven’t noticed any real decrease.
At ClearMyMail, we have recorded a significant drop in some types of spam sent to some users (Not all, some are rising), but as is always the case – the the spammers will always come back, and usually much stronger.
If you are in the UK for example then only 12.5% of your spam actually comes from the US:
http://www.clearmymail.com/SpamIndex/Q2_2008_Top_10_Countries_Sending_Spam_To_UK.aspx
The drop will be very short lived though, spammers are a dedicated bunch and are already moving their operations to other hosts. We are already starting to see the levels rise again.
We are building up for the holiday season, preparing for what is expected to be the biggest spam barrage yet.
Nuts. They must be stopped! Where’s the SPAM relief package? oh, wait they are too busy with bailouts for their pals.
I’m even getting spam on my microwave oven.
If ISP’s could reduce the SPAM traffic, would that be enough to eliminate the bandwidth limit for their users?
locator dude is king.
KingLocator.com – just lettin’ it be known.
All the spammers and hosting services supporting those bozos should be in jail. Just think of the amount of time and productivity wasted by average users and the obscene messages in those spams. Even worse, the amount of energy (carbon footprint) used to send spams which constitute about 90% of the Internet traffic.
Jail? Let’s eat them and steal their power.
All those spammers and supporting host services should be sent to jail. Think of about of energy and carbon footprint they create.
“legit” email will increase in down market {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/T2PGlsC4Ya_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”"legit” email will increase in down market ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/3Pme8EoZ2A”}}}
Help fight the online hacking and spam. Ban these domains from your webservers:
http://www.bloglinux.org/2008/11/list-of-some-known-hackers-injection-pages/
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And now spam levels are at a much higher level than they were before McColo got disconnected. All it’s done in the longer term is teach spammers to make their systems more resilient.