Spam knocks Optus email out

in brief Optus has blamed a spam attack on an email outage that occurred between late Wednesday and Thursday morning.

"We did have some issues on Wednesday evening and our engineers rebooted the email servers," a spokesperson told ZDNet.com.au.

Optus' IT security systems had detected an influx of spam directed towards its mail servers. Its engineers rebooted its email servers at around 10pm Wednesday night, the spokesperson said.

Customers had reported email services were timing out and that they could not log into their accounts, said the spokesperson. Services were restored at 10am yesterday, the spokesperson said.

• Related stories

• Alerts

Add your opinion

Not Surprised Anonymous -- 31/07/09

Optus must surely have one of the weakest SPAM filters available. For several weeks now I have been getting 15 - 20 SPAM a day getting past their filter including plenty that purport to be from Optus themselves. Have contacted Tech Support only to be told they can't filter emails from outside that purport to come from Optus :(

I'm surprised it has taken this long.

• Reply to comment
• Reply to story
• Report offensive content

yahoo had similar issue Anonymous -- 31/07/09

yahoo was foen as well the other day for close to 12 hours.

• Reply to comment
• Reply to story
• Report offensive content

yahoo had similar issue Anonymous -- 31/07/09

yahoo was foen as well the other day for close to 12 hours.

• Reply to comment
• Reply to story
• Report offensive content

Were not happy till your not happy Bruce -- 01/08/09

I spent one hour twenty minutes with the optus call centre trying to report this problem.

Not surprisingly (I guess) the problem was, I was repeatedly assured, not at Optus.

This despite having multiple Apple Mac's all exhibiting the same problem (could not receive email) while on the same Mac I could send and receive from other ISP email accounts.

The problem was variously described to me as being as being my email client, my configuration of the email client, the Apple MAC itself (yes all of my Macs at the same time !). Unless I agreed to reconfigure the email client or creat new email profiles with the 'correct' configuration I was told nothing could be done. Finally, when, of course, none of this resolved the problem, I was assured since Optus Webmail worked then it could not possibly be a problem with Optus Mail. (huh?)

Then I was told to take the Mac to the Apple store for repair. Anything to make me just go away. Ultimately, at the 1 hour 20 minute mark I was told by the operator that they did have a problem with the servers and it might take a day or two to fix.

Imagine how many customers, not technically adept, would have given up long before, and will be taking the Optus experts advice... carting their PC off for 'repair'

• Reply to comment
• Reply to story
• Report offensive content

lol shoddy tech support sucks -- 03/08/09 (in reply to #320170948)

one acronym fits here perfectly

"ROFL"

• Reply to comment
• Report offensive content

Useless Optus Spam Filters Anonymous -- 03/08/09

Have to agree, I am sick to death of the crap I get filling up my inbox. I created a special mailbox and move it there just to see how much there is. Beats their spam mailbox by miles. I have emailed them several times and all I get back is the standard template reply. Last time I asked them to contact Google and find out why Gmail could filter out 99.999% of spam and Optus couldn't. No reply. No surprise. They are useless and as you can see by previous replies, their Tech Support is useless also. They must have ex Ozemail people working for them, they did the same thing, blame you, your computer, the weather, George Bush, whatever, nothing was ever Ozemail's fault. I bet Justin Miline has implemented the same procedures at Big Pond after he destroyed Ozemail.

• Reply to comment
• Reply to story
• Report offensive content

Agree - Spam Filter "weak" Chad -- 03/08/09

Absolutely agree with the comments with Optus' spam filter - it is nothing short of useless. I've also been through the painful experience of trying to escalate the issue through tech support to no avail.

I ended up routing all my Optus mail through Gmail - its spam filter picks virtually 100% of the spam Optus lets through (think I've had 2 spam emails in 18 months).

Oh, and here's a word of advice to every single help desk on the planet - VOICE RECOGNITION PHONE SUPPORT IS TERRIBLE SERVICE. The thought of calling Optus' help desk for anything and having to try and get a machine to properly route my call in a timely fashion is intensely frustrating - and I've got a clear Australian voice - heaven help you if have a speech difficulty or an accent.

Even Optus know this is true - Call sales instead of support - you get to a person very quickly.

• Reply to comment
• Reply to story
• Report offensive content

Optus Spam Filter Anonymous -- 06/08/09

Optus' spam filtering is nothing short of useless, and has been this way for years.

Most of the spam is from spammers who have harvested the directory of every live Optus email account!

As the situation is so bad, I have got to the point of hosting my own mail, but Optus won't allow automatic forwarding of my Optusnet mail which can be pumped through a real SPAM filter.

Just looks like they are not serious in addressing spam - maybe because we have to pay to download it whether we want it of not!

• Reply to comment
• Reply to story
• Report offensive content

• Just In

• Most Popular

• Most Discussed

Reader Services

Popular Topics

Essentials