At 9am Pacific Time on November 10, a hosting company called McColo was shut down.
I’m sure hosting companies go out of business all the time, but this was significant because a company called MessageLabs– which specializes in large-scale e-mail systems– noticed a bit of a drop in the number of spam messages it saw crossing its servers.
Other companies hosting vast e-mail farms, or otherwise measuring e-mail traffic on the internet at large, saw a similar precipitous drop in the amount of spam flying around. It’s clear that McColo was home to a huge group of spammers– some estimates say as much as 25% of the global spam came through their servers.
Woo hoo! Now let’s find the other hosting companies enabling these spammers…