'Despammer' strike yields little impact -- yet

But one of the strike's organizers says it's having a major impact in some of Usenet's seedier corners, and even in some newsgroups dedicated to serious issues such as surviving sexual abuse, as spammers' postings begin to pile up in any newsgroup with a name containing the word "sex."

"The sex groups are fairly inundated, and this in spite of the fact that at least one of the most prolific spammers of all stopped posting Friday," said Chris Lewis, one of the 40 or so "despammers" who called the work stoppage to call attention to the strain that spam messages put on Usenet networks.

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The spam is out there
As of Monday morning, even groups such as "alt.sexual.abuse.recovery" contained "traffic volumes five and 10 times higher than normal, all spam, mostly pornographic pictures," Lewis said.

"The majority of mainstream Usenet areas have seen relatively little effect, but if you know what to look for, you can find it," he added.

Evidence of systems crashing due to an overload of spam messages is harder to come by, Lewis said, mainly because few system administrators are willing to admit to crashes. But anecdotal evidence suggests that some crashes may have already occurred, he said.

Junk messages double legitimate ones
If the anti-spammers' estimates are correct, the number of junk messages circulating on Usenet is about double the number of legitimate messages.

The work stoppage could cause Usenet servers to overload as it goes on, and more and more messages accumulate during the strike originally called for a month, but now set to go on "indefinitely."

Larger Internet service providers have said the strike will not have an impact on their subscribers since they perform their own spam filtering.