Developing World Unable and Unwilling to Cope with Spam

Many developing nations such as Nigeria are not only a major source of spam, but also get hit heavily by its side effects.

When spam is sent it uses up resources both on the sending side, and the receiving side. The sending service provider is frequently not aware that they are providing services for a bulk email sender.

Most service providers in developed countries don't tolerate spammers. In some countries like Nigeria, fraudulent spam is one of the few profitable online businesses. As a result, service providers are unlikely to discontinue service even if their customers are engaged in illegal activity.

Service providers under heavy load from spammers have likened the problem to a denial of service attack. If enough email is sent to a given server, at some point it won't be able to handle it. An effective program to stop spam on the server level can help with the problem. However, many of them are not free and all of them take time and effort to deploy.

SpamAssassin is a free filtering system developed by the Apache project. It readily interfaces with most popular open source server configurations.

SpamButcher is a spam blocker for outlook and other email clients using the POP3 protocol. It can be downloaded from this website.

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