Email is surging day by day.   Earlier this month, a sudden and sustained, three fold increase in email traffic to EZ-NetTools customers buried our mail scanner server for several hours.  In short order we had the situation under control.

Background

I am sure that the increase in emails is no surprise to you.   As we mentioned in our February issue of the EZ-NetAdvantage when we announced our new SPAM filter,  SPAM represents between 80 to 90 percent of all emails.

As with the rest of the industry, we have been watching the steady increase in emails over the last two to three years with growing alarm.  At the first of this year, 2004, we were seeing three to five times the level of email traffic per EZ-NetTools account over the previous year.  Since the first of June, the amount of email traffic jumped dramatically, three times what we were experiencing the month before.  That means that in the last 15 months we have experienced more than a 10 fold increase in email traffic for each account.

During the spike in email earlier this month, the part of the email system that scans each email for viruses was swamped and refused to receive anymore email for a while.    No email was lost because the email system tries to resend in few hours.  However there were several delays in the delivery of email.

Solutions

Over the last two years we have implemented a number of enhancements that have increased our capacity a little at a time.  We are still working on completely revamping our configuration so that we can add capacity more easily and quickly.

In response to the recent serge in the last several weeks, we have tripled the number of computers that scan each email for viruses.  We have also improved  the virus scanning algorithms  to be more robust.  These servers are the front line defenses and take the brunt of the email traffic.

We will continue to increase our capacity for storage and processing power in the coming months.  We are working on a deploying an entirely new architecture that can handle the increased traffic and be more expandable.

Conclusion

We are plan to continue to improve the service levels of our email system.  The growing levels of messages have been keeping pace with our efforts to increase capacity.  In the future we will be redoubling our efforts.  We are committed to providing excellent service to you, our customers.  Even though we are processing 10 times the number of messages per account as a few years ago, we have not increased our prices.