[ian@huth]

There are two issues which are affecting email performance, spam and virii.

The problem with spam is that it is compounded by people bouncing spam messages and using unsubscribe links in the spam to try to stop it. Both of these contribute to increasing the volume of email flying about and verify to the spammer that they have found a valid email address.

With virii there are too many unprotected systems and systems with very out of date virus signatures. Systems that become infected quite often start sending out emails galore to everyone in your address book and then repeat the exercise with those newly infected systems and on and on it goes.

The main problem is that the majority of computer users do not really know much about computer security and it is very difficult to get through to them what they should be doing. The walled garden that NTL have used for some virus infections has helped, but it only tackles part of the problem.

NTL customers will suffer more than those of many other ISPs because of the size of their customer base. Spammers will target the biggest ISPs as they are likely to get more results from them.