As the holidays are upon us, the holiday spammers are out in full force trying to get through the many layers of protection we have in place.

Please be extra careful opening those emails this holiday season.  If you're not expecting it -- DELETE it!  If the advertisement or offer sounds too good to be true, it probably is -- DELETE it!  Especially if you are checking several email accounts on the same computer (i.e. @gmail, @yahoo, @aol, etc.).  And please make sure your virus protection is up to date on all your PC's and laptops.

Even though we pride ourselves on the enormous amount of spam we are able to detect and keep out of your inbox, just the sheer volume of bogus mail can cause problems for providers.  This past weekend the volume caught up with us here at ISOCNET.  We received a magnitude of well over 25 times the normal and all of that mail had to be processed through the filtering systems we have in place.  Although nothing was lost, we had to shut the processing down to a crawl which caused an extended delay in processing for the hundreds of thousands of emails we process on a daily basis.  For this we apologize -- but we managed to keep the malicious spam out of your inbox.

We know you may feel this extended delay is unacceptable; however, if you have ever experienced the wrath of a virus on your network, the delay is well worth the protection.

It seems just as soon as we take care of one spam attack and put stop gaps in place to prevent a recurrence, the spammers find a new way to get in...  This action by spammers and hackers is why you get constant security patches on some of your other software -- as soon as one hold is plugged, they find or create another one.  Although it's just a big game to them, it's a terrible inconvenience to everyone else.

Thank you for your understanding and have a Happy and Blessed Holiday!

ISOCNET