Orcon blames rising tide of spam

By PETER GRIFFIN

Orcon has put a two-day disruption to its email services down to growing levels of spam and widespread use among its subscribers of free filtering software to battle it.

The internet provider's managing director, Seeby Woodhouse, said: "The way that our self-designed mail cluster is engineered is that as soon as our SMTP servers start getting bogged down, we just stick some more in.

"We got surprised by the load and it took a couple of days to resolve."

Woodhouse said the mail problem stemmed from the huge uptake of Orcon's new spam and virus filtering services, which were officially released last month.

A steep rise in the level of spam going through Orcon's servers in the past month had also hammered the mail system.

"Our front-end SMTP servers do the spam and virus scanning before delivery to users' mailboxes, hence the reason they got bogged down."

An increase in Orcon's storage space on its mail servers of 80 per cent over the past six months had been necessary to deal with the greater load of genuine email and spam.

Woodhouse said that mirrored industry trends highlighting the hardware costs of ever-increasing spam.

Orcon's mail cluster handles email for 70,000 users across its own customer base as well as 100 smaller internet providers, web-hosting and IT companies, to which the company wholesales internet connectivity.

It had also racked up nearly 30,000 users of its free email service, which includes the free virus scanning and spam filtering.

Woodhouse said Orcon's aggressive acquisition was slowing, with few decent acquisition targets left. He was disappointed not to pick up Iprolink, which he used to work for before joining Orcon.