Australian freemail service slammed by spam

Australian free e-mail provider freemail.com.au is currently being bombarded by servers around the globe after a spammer's decision to include the company in junk messages promoting everything from hair-loss treatments to Viagra.

"In the last 48 hours we have rejected at least 60 million messages. We normally get between 400,000 and 500,000 e-mail messages a day, which is handled well by two servers. We need dozens at the moment," said Derek O'Neil, MD of Indigo Interactive, which is the operator of the freemail.com.au service.

The flood of messages began 3 p.m. Monday, resulting in what O'Neil describes as a kind of a denial-of-service attack. "There's a spammer somewhere in the world -- we think it's in Florida -- who is sending mass e-mails representing the 'from' field as a random string-based username at freemail.com.au," O'Neil said. Full story. -- ZDNet Australia