Question about Spam Emails and My-Doom

[Squizy Taylor]

Hi guys

Forgive me because I am computer illiterate but, I have a question about the increase in spam email being created by this my-doom virus.

I have a personal hotmail account, some emails which I know have been sent to me as far back as Saturday have still not registered in my in-box.

Other emails sent to me yesterday, arrived as soon as they were sent.

My question is, other than for the fact, my friend, whose emails I am waiting on is overseas, and may be using a dodgy email server:

is it possible that all the spam being created by the my-doom virus is slowing down the receipt of email, especially to hotmail which a Microsoft product?

Cheers

 

[Joel]

I'm pretty sure the virus slows down servers, so the email ya mate sent might be in the pipeline, or the server might have been crashed due to the load. I'm not totally sure, so if someone wants to correct me on that, feel free.

 

[jim boy]

Infected Mydoom computers send mail at the rate of three emails a second. This represents about 10000 times increase in the workload for the sending email server. It will only take two or three infected client computers to slow up even a reasonably powerful server. Receiving email servers aren't so badly affected as the virus was sending emails to only a handful of addresses. Depending on where your sending from, you may be lucky and be relatively unaffected. This is why email is so slow.

However Mydoom was a ticking bomb and didn't start sending out emails until today, so there would be other factors involed in why your friend's mail hasn't arrived.

 

[nonchalance]

Also, Hotmail has massively tightened its spam detection, to the level where some legitimate emails get chucked in the junk mail folder.

Try that.