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In what some see as a perfect example of the evidence of cosmic retribution, an avalanche of spam has crashed British Internet service provider Pipex's servers, and stopped delivery of e-mail to its million-plus users for the past week.
Pipex is owned by UUNET, and according to statistics compiled by spam fighting and tracking sites SpamCop and SpamHaus, more spam gets spewed through UUNET than from all the other Internet service providers combined.
A spokesperson for Pipex confirmed that a bulk mailing of 2 million pieces of spam sent through its servers by a Canadian firm last Wednesday caused the failure of its own e-mail service.
Pipex spokesman Richard Woods also told British newspapers that the spam strike might have been a deliberate attack by "hackers."
But some spam fighters dispute that and believe that Pipex's problems are simply a practical demonstration of the dangers of spam, and an ironic bit of payback.
"Chickens always come home to roost," said Julian Haight, of SpamCop.
The system-stalling spam that crippled eight Pipex e-mail servers has to be manually removed before normal operations can continue, a company spokesman said.
The problem is expected to keep its customers' e-mail tied up until Friday.
In a statement released on Tuesday, UUNET said, "The Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (UCE) wrecked havoc upon Pipex mail queuing systems and is only allowing small amounts to reach customers' mailboxes.
"UUNET regrets the inconvenience and advises customers who are aware of urgent incoming mail that has not arrived to contact the sender and make alternative arrangements."
Richard Woods, UUNET's public affairs spokesman, told reporters from British newspapers The Telegraph and The Times that he believed the spam flood was the work of hackers.
Woods also acknowledged that there was a chance that the spam had been sent by accident -- "Someone may have been a little over-enthusiastic with their direct mailing," he said -- but added he believed anyone who could send that many e-mails at once would possess "pretty sophisticated hacking skills," a statement that angered some spam fighters.
"That is complete nonsense ... this was a spammer, not a hacker, and no skills of any sort are needed to operate spamware," said Steve Linford of the SpamHaus, a British spam-fighting project.
Spamware is bulk e-mail software whose principal purpose is to send unsolicited bulk e-mail. The applications attempt to hide the true identity of the spam's sender, falsify e-mail header (origin) information, disguise URLs to obstruct identification of a website advertised in the spam, and/or attempt to circumvent ISP spam filters.
"You can right now buy exactly the same spamware packages that would have been used to send the spam that brought down Pipex, complete with spamming instructions, from any number of UUNET-hosted spamware sites such as abulkemailsource.com," Linford said.
UUNET now delivers 30 billion pieces of spam each year to e-mail users around the world, according to statistics gathered by SpamHaus.
But Steve Atkins of Sam Spade, a spam tracking tool, cautioned that not all of UUNET's divisions are spam friendly, and said that much of the spam that ends up in inboxes is actually sent through the downstream providers that rent dialup access from UUNET.
A UUNET spokesperson reaffirmed UUNET's spam policy prohibiting users to send unsolicited, commercial bulk e-mail, and said that UUNET has 42 full-time staffers who keep the service's customers in compliance with the policy.
She also pointed out that UUNET carries some of the traffic for AOL, Microsoft Network, and Earthlink, among other large ISPs, and said that much of the spam that slithers through its servers actually originates "from our customers' customers."
Spam fighters still hope that the situation will encourage UUNET to tighten its spam-fighting policies even further, although some don't see the spam-flood as a justified karmic payback.
"Pipex' mail servers were heavily loaded, and they were in the process of upgrading them. They were just unlucky that this massive spam run hit them before they got the new servers online," Atkins said.
Others weren't quite as charitable.
"I would say that most of the Internet community has no sympathy for UUNET servers crashing under the weight of spam," Linwood said, "because every day, UUNET's spammers pump far more than 2 million spam e-mails onto the Internet."
