Viruses - not necessarily. (Score 1)

In the short term, the mailing viruses are willing. I think it's to early to say that the spammers are going to benefit from this in the long run. True -- anti-spam services (especially those that are poorly funded or inadequately scalable) have been shutting down recently. They've been taxed, incredibly taxed, but the last two months' virus activity -- like the rest of the mail infrastructure. Add in some highly publicized ddos attacks, and, hell, many services would buckle under that kind of pressure. I think the real lesson is that many centralized spam services are inflexible and not hardened enough to meet the task (and the resistance). Maybe, generally speaking, that's the wrong idea. Maybe. In an even longer term, I think things are even less clear. Technologically, right now, it's spam/viruses 1, civiliam e-mail 0. But the troubles have been so well publicized, and so generally annoying, that already institutions are finally starting to implement basic hygiene measures, in some cases overcoming substantial status-quo / administrative pressure.