31 May 2007
Broadband provider Tiscali faced a tirade of angry subscribers yesterday after spammers managed to knock out the entire email service for its 1.48 million British broadband customers.
Tiscali assured its subscribers that engineers were working urgently to solve the problems, which had seen a large number of users' emails failing to deliver to their intended recipients.
"We have been targeted by spammers using our service, which in turn has meant other ISPs have taken measures to block mail sent by Tiscali," read a statement on the provider's website.
"This is not affecting all delivery addresses. Some mail continues to be delivered as normal."
Tiscali concluded by saying it was installing new hardware and updating its spamfilters to ensure a similar episode doesn't happen in future.
Consumers have been left angry by Tiscali's response and one IT expert has expressed his surprise at such an email outage being caused by spammers alone.
Speaking to the BBC, Richard Cox of Spamhaus, a not-for-profit organisation of IT professionals that tracks and prints lists of current spammers, said that his group had seen nothing on its radars to indicate such a massive use of spam.
"Spamhaus is certainly not seeing anything that would justify major blocking, unless it is being targeted at one or two specific networks," he continued, explaining that Spamhaus uses fake email accounts to lure spammers in so it can identify them.
Mr Cox even suggested that Tiscali may be using the excuse of a massive spam attack to cover up for a separate technical failure on their part.
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