BigPond rejects six million spam e-mails a day

Managing director Justin Milne said in an e-mail to BigPond users last night he had given the go-ahead "to further boost" the filters as spam continued to be a "common problem" for Internet users.

A BigPond spokesperson said the upgrade would increase filtering capacity by a further 15 percent. Spam zombies would be targeted and additional content-based spam classifications implemented under the project.

Milne said all mail entering or leaving the BigPond network had been filtered since April last year.

The managing director also used the e-mail to highlight customer growth and the need to employ sturdy systems to cope with BigPond's data traffic volumes.

The provider -- Australia's largest -- is moving about 1.3 trillion kilobytes each month across its network and more than 20 million e-mails every day.

Milne added the provider was about to sign up its two-millionth Internet customer "so you can see why we need robust systems to keep things ticking over!" It is believed the carrier is around two weeks away from reaching that milestone.

He said improvements in the wings included the already-mooted billing system upgrade which would allow customers to combine all their Internet charges with their Telstra single bill. He said the current pilot was "working well" and full rollout was expected later this year.

A new BPay facility for BigPond users was attracting extensive use.

Milne also said BigPond had put "a lot of time and effort" into upgrading its cable network through adding capacity and backups, removing old infrastructure and standardising its wired and wireless modems.

The provider has also implemented additional self-serve options to its My BigPond section of BigPond.com.