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Another Step in the Fight Against Spam
November 17, 2008 04:24 PM | AutomationDonovan Lambright, Automation Librarian
In our never-ending attempts to block spam on the SELCO email server, while leaving legitimate email intact, we have taken another step. Last week, we began blocking all email from carefully selected countries known to be spam havens. This is not a step we took lightly. We first considered blocking such email about a year ago and decided against it as too overreaching a solution. Increasingly sophisticated messages, including some inviting recipients to click links to get "Presidential election news", caused us to reconsider.
Having decided to block all messages from spam havens, we consulted a number of lists maintained by anti-spam groups. The highly regard anti-spam group Spamhaus, for example, gave us this top 10 list of spam origin countries:
- United States
- China
- Russian Federation
- South Korea
- United Kingdom
- Germany
- India
- Brazil
- Japan
- France
Well, we knew we weren't going to block email from the US. Nevertheless, comparing such lists with the statistics from our spam filter yielded good results. In the end, we decided to block all messages from the following six countries. This table also shows how many messages came to the SELCO email server from each country from 10-14 to 11-13:
| Country | Email Messages Sent to SELCO from 10-14-2008 to 11-13-2008 | Email Messages Blocked as Spam |
| Aruba | 115 | 115 |
| Russia | 12,000 | 12,000 |
| Taiwan | 4,500 | 4,500 |
| Hong Kong | 350 | 350 |
| China | 12,000 | 12,000 |
| Ukraine | 5,500 | 5,500 |
You read that correctly. All of the email received from these countries during the month examined were spam. During this time period, we blocked 212,000 spam messages. Adding up the numbers on this chart, we find that 34,465 came from these six countries. That's about 16%.
It's another step forward.
