Website Design in Aberdeen, Scotland.
Development,
Content Management and Web Hosting
Chinese and Korean Spam
May 11, 2005
Due to the ever increasing amounts of spam fired at our mail servers, we recently tried the radical action of banning mail servers from China and Korea from connecting to us. And we were delighted to find that we were able to reduce the volumes of spam handled by our antispam filters substantially. Not only that but we were able to make a more than commensurate decrease in the amount of spam that actually gets through our filters.
It goes against the grain for an internet company to have to ban part of the internet from connecting to us, but we felt we had no choice. We followed the lead of many companies in doing this, but nevertheless were really surprised at how effective the tactic has been.
To do this, we were able to utilize the excellent scripts to be found on http://www.okean.com/asianspamblocks.html. So here is a quick thank you to the webmaster at that site for making this excellent resource available to us.
Anti spam measures are a problem for us, just as they are for every other company operating on the internet. We have to keep them tight enough for our customers to not be overwhelmed, but at the same time, if we turn the anti-spam measures too tight, we find that we and our customers lose legitimate email that has been caught by the heuristics. And this is very dangerous, so we are forced to keep our anti-spam measures reasonably moderate.
Another problem we face is deciding what to do with spam that we intercept. The ideal strategy SHOULD be to bounce it back to where it came from. But this raises problems too. Most of the spam has a forged sender, so it bounces back to the purported sender, who refuses to accept it and they bounce it back to us. We reject it again, but it bounces then to our secondary backup mailserver, which tries to forward it to us again, and this pattern repeats several times.
Because of this phenomenon, we often have to accept and discard the spam, otherwise the load on our servers becomes intolerable. But this causes severe problems when our filters mistakenly classify something as spam, which isn't spam, because if we have binned it, there is no retrieving it for the irate would-be recipient who wonders where his super important big contract tender has disappeared to (and he hasn't kept a copy).
So there are a lot of fine lines to cross when dealing with spam and mail servers, and unfortunately we don't have all the right answers all the time either.
But it is galling that because of the amount of absolute rubbish that flies about from the professional spammers, the real loser are the publishers of genuine newsletters, and the local companies who quite legitimately - and fully within the terms of the law - wish to make potential customers aware of what they have to offer. These people, and all of us, suffer because of the actions of the bulk spammers.
We have long hoped for some kind of government or supra government intervention on the matter of internet spamming, but to date nothing of any real substance has emerged and I don't think there is anything significant on the horizon either. What a pity. As we move further into the internet age, the maelstrom just gets maelstrommier.
Finally let me say that if you do business with either of these countries, we are quite happy to whitelist any server you specify, which is appropriately managed.
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