Should Russian and Korean spam be deleted without quarantine?

As I do almost every evening - I'm reviewing SpamButcher's intercepted spam bin.

It lists all the messages SpamButcher has caught recently. Tonight it looked like this:

So what are all those question marks?

They're messages written in non-western character sets. Specifically - most of them are Russian, with a few Korean spam messages.

Unfortunately, the way SpamButcher is written, it's not easy to properly display these characters within the spam mail stopper. On the other hand, I don't sell any software to those countries, so it's unlikely many of my users could read the emails even if SpamButcher did render them properly.

This brings up a subsequent question - should SpamButcher even bother sending Russian or Korean email to "quarantine?" Since they're all almost certainly spam, and most users can't read them - wouldn't it make more sense to just delete the messages?

In short - the answer is probably, "yes." However, every now and then I find myself drifting into the fuzzy world of software marketing.

Letting users know about all the email that SpamButcher has intercepted helps to confirm its value as a Windows spam filter. Right now I can see that SpamButcher has blocked about 4400 messages in the last 15 days. If I automatically purged all Russian and Korean email that might drop down to only about 3000 messages.

Some spyware removal tools take this approach to an extreme. Many of them exagerate the security / privacy concerns of "cookies." Many such programs list any detected cookies alongside truly malicious software. It's my feeling this adds enough confusion to be a genuine disservice to the users.

There's no question that some users really might prefer not to be bothered at all with email in languages other than their own. Future versions of SpamButcher may offer functionality to immediately delete messages based upon what language or character set they're written in.

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