I noticed an interesting change with my ISP the other day. About a week ago, for some inexplicable reason, SpamAssassin, finally kicked in on mail going though the ISP. I had set the option to use SpamAssassin many months before.
The result was that spam getting to my inbox was dramatically reduced (from about 200 messages per day to about 50). The only problem was that I now needed to clear out the trash on my ISP every day. Then SoBig happened, and while I was getting my fair share of virus laden messages on my desktop, most were getting caught by SpamAssassin.
Yesterday morning, however, I discovered a flood of SoBig messages in my inbox. When I logged into my ISP, there weren't any in the Trash. SpamAssassin was passing all the virus laden messages straight through to me.
I am guessing that the ISP realized that they had a huge problem in the making. By capturing SoBig messages on the server and storing them in the Trash, they were rapidly collecting megabytes of 100k attachments. Now rather than realizing that I probably didn't want them and just deleting them off their server, they passed the problem off to me. Gee thanks.
But, I can see their point. Users are more likely to handle the problem if they know that it is there. If they didn't know that their trash was rapidly filling up, they wouldn't clear it out.
Also, users might be better equipped to handle the flood. For me it was a simple filter that checked for two hyphens in the date field (a suggestion pointed out on the Mac Net Journal), every message that the filter caught goes in to the mail trash and the virus containing attachments go into the computers trash.
10:37:42 AM 
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