U.S. is number one! (in spam)

Sophos has released another report on which countries are the biggest senders of spam.

As in many previous surveys, the U.S. came out tops. This time around they (we) clocked in at just a hair under 20% of all spam messages sampled.

United States	19.6%
China / Hong Kong	8.4%
South Korea	6.5%
Poland	4.8%
Germany	4.2%
Brazil	4.1%
France	3.3%
Russia	3.1%
Turkey	2.9%
United Kingdom	2.8%
Italy	2.8%
India	2.5%

To provide some perspective, the U.S. is also the source of a large amount of legitimate, legal and wanted email. The same is true of course of the other countries - but in reality, most SpamButcher customers don't get a lot of email from China and Korea. Our software is well aware of this and uses it to help stop spam. That is, it factors in the country of origin when deciding which messages to divert.

It's interesting to note that India seems to send a relatively small percentage of spam compared to China's comparable population. I don't know what percentages of the respective countries are on the internet, but I would intuitively think that more spammers would outsource their IT operations to India as they specialize so heavily in providing such services.

What's not mentioned in the report is if the spam is targeted at natives of the originating countries, or intended to be sent abroad. Obviously there is some of each for any given country. I'm consistently amazed at how much spam I receive that is in Chinese, Russian, Spanish or German when there is no indication that any of my accounts reside in a country which speaks those languages.

Perhaps a future version of the SpamButcher email filter will allow the user to select their native tongue and country, and choose to block messages that don't correlate with their selection. Obviously, this could cause false-positives, but more often than not the user would know when they'd be receiving an email from a foreign nation, and could choose to whitelist that address. Although, sometimes companies based in one country will outsource their support operations to another without informing their users.

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