14 DAY TRIAL // I've seen spam having some pretty serious effects until now. From getting people infected with viruses (and later scammed) even to death. But never until now have I heard of e-mail accounts going down because of spam.
Telecommunication firm Onetel had serious problems after a huge spam wave hit the Inboxes. 30.000 of the company's e-mail customers have been unable to send or receive emails properly for more than a month and many say their complaints to Onetel appear to have fallen on deaf ears, as The Telegraph informs us.
So, this is pretty bad for the poor guys that are having problems with their mail addresses. Sure, you're going to say that there are plenty of e-mail clients out there and you could even suggest a few. That's not the issue. The true problem comes from the fact that when you run a certain business and customers are used to a certain e-mail address, it's hard to notify them and make sure that all of them know you got a new address now. You might lose some customers with the loss of your stable address. That's why they couldn't give up their electronic mail boxes.
So, they couldn't change the client and they couldn't make much use of the one they already had - now this is what I call a problem!
Also, as seen on the same site I mentioned above, David Goldie, chief executive of Carphone Warehouse telecoms division said engineers had been working flat out to fix the problem and he hoped to see an improvement by the beginning of this week. Also, while admitting this problem they've also said that users will receive compensation. So the story does have a sort of happy end...
This is just one effect spam has, and for those of you that were wondering how the heck could it cause death, well - some guy ordered drugs from a hoax site he was notified via spam. The drugs weren't any good and they actually killed him!