Spam Killer

Latin American and Caribbean

[herb]

Set a filter on our email server to reroute all emails coming from 200.0.0.0 - 200.255.255.255 IP ranges assigned to: Latin American and Caribbean IP address Regional Registry

Sent them over to a holding box. Did some calculations and they represent 27 percent of all mail. Most xxx rated and not a single valid email.

Just looked at the mail from: 211.0.0.0 - 211.255.255.255: Asia Pacific Network Information Centre. Most coming from RIPE.

Should be able to get a similar result with it.

I'm going to keep putting them in a holding box for review until we are comfortable with sending them off directly to the NUL folder.

Hate to shrink the reach of the net but the spam is getting totally out of control

[kevinpate]

The info site I operate has similar blocks in place.
99.999% of the traffic coming our way from that range related to searches for scripts. I haven't lost any sleep over instituting the blocks.

[ShawnR]

Great. How many countries are you blocking?

I understand your dilema. I'd advise you don't lose any sleep over it. Japan and those other countries might be major players in the global economy, but so what. In fact, I'd suggest just go the whole hog and ban 210.0.0.0 - 211.255.255.255. Who needs Australia, anyway?

Many years ago I did some work in anti-terrorism. I was taught that counter-terrorism measures need to be such that the restrictions on the normal running of a function are minimised, else you allow the terrorist to win without him even gaining access to the function.

If the only solution we can think of is to turn the Internet into a whole bunch of isolated networks then we've allowed the spammers to succeed in destroying it.

[ncsuk]

Tell the governments that and get them to outlaw it.

Yeah right - not this century.

[ShawnR]

Tell the governments that and get them to outlaw it.
Yeah right - not this century

Well, that might be part of a solution. It won't be easy to get all governments on side, and even then, policing it is another matter.

But that is certainly not the whole solution. There are many other parts to the solution.

Maybe it is OK to block all of Japan, Korea, etc if your site is the local under 12s football club. But if it is anything serious... Imagine you are an ISP or a major corporation and your customers or company staff suddenly discover that they haven't been receiving emails from their Japanese customers or their Korean suppliers because you decided to turn those countries off. You won't have a job. They'd find another ISP, or another Sys-Admin.

Sure, other solutions are a bit more effort than just turning off a whole block of numbers, but I think we need to spend the effort.