Hey spammers - I'm not Russian!

I try to review all the mail that SpamButcher catches on a daily basis. It's generally good practice - in the very-rate circumstance the anti-spam email code intercepts something I really need. It also lets me stay on top of spam trends at a glance.

In the past view days I've noticed a very large number of messages in non-western character sets. SpamButcher displays these message's subjects like, "????--? ?."

Upon further analysis - most of these messages are in Russian, with most actually originating from Russia. I can't be positive what they're trying to sell - but it looks like pirated software.

What's interesting here is that there is nothing to my knowledge that would indicate any of my email addresses belong to someone who speaks Russian. Certainly, spambutcher.com isn't registered in Russia, or points to a Russian IP.

Further, a fairly small percent of the internet population is Russian. I don't know the actual numbers, but I'd speculate it's under 5%. Since we don't have any customers there, SpamButcher actually takes measures to block email from Russian IP addresses.

So why the heck would a spammer waste valuable bandwidth sending their Russian spam out to the entire planet?

The answer is simple - it's not their bandwidth. Spammers almost never use their own servers - so they don't bear the hosting costs. It's easy to be lazy when wasting someone else's resources.

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