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A blunt tool to stop 50% of SPAM?


C2H5OH

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Here follows my very naive suggestion; apologies if it's been done to death before.

I may be unique, but I doubt it, in that presently I do not expect to receive real and wanted email

from anywhere in Russia or China. I would happily risk losing an important message in exchange for my

UK ISP rejecting all incoming emails from IP addresses in either those countries' address space.

As well as stopping the present waves of spam, this would also curtail the similar waste of bandwidth

being expended in handling non-delivery reports from Russian ISPs who blindly accept forged "From"

headers.

There are of course international reciprocal agreements in place which may result in (say) China

retaliating by blocking all emails originating from my ISP, but I've already bought my Russian bride

and cheap copy of Adobe Acrobat ;-)

If I do need to correspond with someone in Russia I'd suggest they sign up for a Hotmail account.

OK, I'm running for cover now...

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You may not have correspondents in China, Russia, or Brazil, but other customers of your ISP may.

However, many people who have their own servers or use a spam filter such as spamcop email or Mailwasher do block or filter out email from any country where they don't have contacts.

Miss Betsy

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You may not have correspondents in China, Russia, or Brazil, but other customers of your ISP may.

However, many people who have their own servers or use a spam filter such as spamcop email or Mailwasher do block or filter out email from any country where they don't have contacts.

Miss Betsy

And the SpamCop email account has several countries you can block, though Russia is not one of them.

South Korea (the country) korea.services.net korea.services.net

China (the country) cn.countries.nerd.dk countries.nerd.dk/more.html

Nigeria nigeria.blackholes.us www.blackholes.us

Argentina argentina.blackholes.us www.blackholes.us

Brazil brazil.blackholes.us www.blackholes.us

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We run our own in house mail server. Amongst other DNS based blocklists like spamcop and spamhaus, I also reject all mail from: Korea, China, Nigeria, Russia, Brazil, Poland, Germany, and Taiwan.

These countries were selected after a careful analysis of all the spam that got through the other blocklists over a several month period.

As you can see, not only is your suggestion not bad one, but it is already in use in many places. However, as Miss Betsy pointed out, this type of filtering may not work so well for an ISP where some customers may have legitimate contacts in these countries. It is generally not practical for ISPs to setup filtering on some recipients but not others, as most mail software doesn't readily support this type of configuration, and those that do would be a nightmare to try to maintain.

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We run our own in house mail server. Amongst other DNS based blocklists like spamcop and spamhaus, I also reject all mail from: Korea, China, Nigeria, Russia, Brazil, Poland, Germany, and Taiwan.

For over a year now I have had a very extensive 400 line Sieve scri_pt in use on my IMAP account at FastMail through which most of my mail passes. It filters, rejects and sorts incoming mail. I have 32 countries on my list! As long as you accept mail that you want before rejecting the mail that you don't want you can eliminate spam from many countries without losing any good mail from known contacts. Of course as has already been said, this is something a user has to implement but it is very effective if you have the facilities at your disposal and the time and patience to put something together. In addition anything tagged as being on the SpamCop list is sent to a Junk folder rather than being deleted.

I don't think I could accomplish this with Outlook Express. :D

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