Mopar93 - 12:30 pm on Apr 14, 2006 (gmt 0)

Interesting thread, Maurice. do you receive lots of spam emails from Mainland?

I assume you mean the USA?

I get maybe one or two spams per week that actually get through. Then I deal with them.

There are a number of "attempts", but they don't get past the mail server. They are generally rejected due to incorrect protocols in the header so the body of the email is never received.

The one I get a big kick out of are the ones that come from ".biz" email addresses. Every one of them uses "HELO friend" in the header. Stupid spammers just don't know any better. I've also never personally seen a legitimate .biz email address. They always fail to get through.

All the spammers using phony email addresses fail just for that reason, they are using phony email addresses. The callback function catches that one every time.

My operation is very small, but still good for a comparison in percentages. Prior to blocking out China, Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Russia, Bulgaria, Africa, much of South America, and other countries, I would receive maybe 300-400 spam attempts in a 24 hour period. Now I get maybe 10-20 attempts. I just got to work and looked at the log files and see that between the time I went home last evening until this morning, there were only 5 spam attempts during the night. None of them had correct headers and were rejected.

So, yes, I get spam attempts from the United States, but they don't get through and they appear mostly to be from home computers possibly affected by a virus or something. But when a spam does get through from the US, I can do something about it. I always send the info to the ISP and they will deal with it. Many times I call them on the phone and speak to someone in charge personally. That really gets some attention. I've had people fired for trying to send spam from work computers.

I won't waste my time trying to send an email to an ISP in China, they'll just ignore it. The best method is to just block the country. I can do that because I don't have any friends or customers in China. Others may not be so lucky.

-Maurice