Spam can be more than a mere inconvenience, as tens of thousands of Virgin Media DSL customers in the UK can testify to after having been unable to access their email for days last week due to what is said to have been a spam attack. Virgin Media uses Tucows’s OpenSRS email service.
The Virgin Media DSL service has about 200,000 customers. Approximately half of these were affected.
There are also a number of other ISPs and resellers using the same email service and hence suffered similar problems. The email outage was so severe that Elliot Noss, the president and chief executive of Tucows, has posted a public letter of apology on the OpenSRS website.
