In Europe, Auto Spam Translation Kicks In 102
An anonymous reader writes "While spam levels globally remain at a two-year high of approximately 90 percent, some European countries are seeing levels of over 95%. According to a new MessageLabs report (PDF here), countries such as Germany, France and the Netherlands are being heavily targeted by spammers with automated spam translation techniques. The use of automated translation services enables multiple-language spam runs and is responsible for a 13% increase in spam levels in these countries since May."
Re:Hey it me. We held last week, but you never ask (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Still (Score:3, Interesting)
Coming from and targeted to aren't necessarily the same thing.
That said, I'd still be willing to bet that any figures that say most spam comes from the USA are heavily inflated by the general number of computers connected to the internet - particularly the number of computers infected with some sort of botnet connected to the internet - and not actually directly from companies, organizations, or people based in the USA.
As an aside, I think one of the issues with the ever-increasing amount of spam e-mail is that addresses don't tend to get removed from spam lists - just added to. With time, the "send-to" lists would likely grow larger and larger, with a number of the addresses on them either being no longer in use or simply no longer existing. The attempts to spam them would still clog 'the tubes', but it might not represent a proportional increase in the amount of spam that gets seen by human eyes.
99.9% of my gmail spam is US based (Score:2, Interesting)
yep, if i just pick one (of the 5,000 in my spam folder) at random and examine the headers it comes from a US based domain, registered with a US based hidden private reg company from a US based registra, hosted in the US, on a US IP (connected with MZIMA or Texas usually), with Domainkeys and valid TXT records advertising a US based scam/company, the amount of foreign spam or from a botnet or China is so small its negligible
it would be simple to catch these people but yet nothing is done and my spam folder continues to fill relentlessly
it makes me wonder if the US is even trying to stop them judging by the persistence and regularity of the mail received
Re:Why are spam levels still this high? (Score:1, Interesting)
But your "non-delivery notification" is what the other person was responding to
Yes, and he/she was wrong. I'm not sending any non-delivery notification. I'm rejecting spam, which means the mailserver checks the mail while the smtp connection from the sending mailserver is still open. if it is considered spam, it will not accept the message and tell this to the sending mail server. Now it's the sending mail server's responsibility to tell it's user that the message could not be delivered. Legit MTAs will do this (they have to) while spammers usually just drop the connection and move on. They even seem to remember this decision, i noticed a drop in incoming spam on servers that are not queueing spam.
Once again: As long as i don't queue a message (and thus promise to the sender that i will take care of it), i can reject all spam, risking false negatives (got it right this time)) as i know a *legit* sender will be notified by *his/her* mta and can take action (i.e. check if his mx is blacklisted).