Fighting German and Russian Spammers

For whatever reason, the last few months I've seen extremely high levels of spam with either German or Russian language content. By this I mean unsolicited messages actually written in those languages - whether or not they came from networks located within the corresponding countries.

The Russian spam is definitely atypical. It most commonly seems to be promoting various business seminars actually occurring in Moscow! This means that the potential market for these spammers is limited to not only Russian speakers, but those physically located close to Moscow, or are willing and able to fly there.

Most of the German spam is stock related, intermixed with some "public announcements" I'm unable to decipher purportedly coming from Samsung (I'm skeptical if Samsung's actually involved with the spam though).

So why am I getting this stuff? Simple - spammers buy large databases of email addresses, and then send to them using hijacked computers. The difference in cost of sending 5,000 emails and 1 million may be trivial. It may not even be worth the effort to filter out the 98% of email addresses belonging to speakers of other languages.

It would also seem at least some of the German stock spammers are just a little dumb.

So how does SpamButcher's junk mail filters deal with these messages?

Filtering email composed in Russian is easy. It's generally written in a special character set which can be detected. Since SpamButcher has never had a single Russian customer - we almost always block email in Russian. If you're expecting legitimate email written in Russian - just add the sender to your list of "Known Good Senders" and SpamButcher will let it through.

German spam is a bit tougher. Blocking all German email isn't an option, since SpamButcher does have many German-speaking customers. The good news is that we've devised a little trick.

SpamButcher can easily detect what language the local computer is running. If the system is set to German, then German emails are assumed to be non-problematic. Otherwise, German email messages are analyzed with a higher level of scrutiny.

If your system is set to English, but you commonly get German email - simply putting the filter "conservative" mode overrides the effect of this feature.

Some of this functionality was added to SpamButcher recently. If you're getting copious quantities of non-English Spam - make sure to get the newest version of SpamButcher (upgrades are always free).

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