Spam from China

Detecting the presence of a foreign language is one way to prevent spam of this kind. The risk is that actual speakers of the languages in question won't be aware of the filters, and may miss valuable email.

Clearly, the message went to thousands, if not millions of computers where the owner may not even be able to recognize the text as Chinese, let alone read it. It would be intuitive that they would stand to make more money by specifically targeting known speakers of Chinese, or at minimum restricting their email to Chinese domains. This still doesn't account for the fact that there are multiple written formats of Chinese, which are not cross-intelligible.

So why would a spammer in China send email to non-Chinese domains, and addresses that have no apparent indication that they belong to someone who speaks Chinese?

There may be a number of reasons, but one possibility is a strong indicator of exactly how profitable sending unsolicited email can be.

First, there's no indicator that the email sender didn't initially target their campaign at people believed to be fluent in Chinese. But, the more specific an email list, the smaller it will be. Obtaining large, reliable lists of email addresses targeted at a certain audience is not always trivial. He or she may have, "only" had a few hundred thousand known email addresses of Chinese speakers.

In contrast, there are countless, much larger general purpose email address lists used by spammers. They are bought and sold on Ebay. They can be readily found floating around the internet. I know, I seem to be on about all of them.

The quality of these lists can be quite poor. They often contain a large percentage of invalid addresses. Some also include, "honey pot" addresses intentionally sprinkled throughout the web by spam fighters. An internet host that sends email to a honey pot address my find their network on a blacklist used by email filters.

Our spammer may have simply run out of addresses on their list of known Chinese speakers, then switched over to a general purpose list; in the hope of hitting just a few more potential customers.

For any line of traditional advertising, this wouldn't make any sense. It simply would not be profitable. With spam however, the sender can use a network of hacked computers to send the junk for them. In this case, the cost approaches zero. If the spammer gets even one additional sale from email millions of additional people, he or she may come out ahead.

This is the same reason many spammers continue to send messages which are painfully easy to detect with anti spam filter software. Even though most of their messages are blocked by server-side or end-user software, the few percent that still survives may easily be enough to turn a profit.

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