So what happened to Russia?

I just finished up some code that allows SpamButcher to understand where an email originated from. Hopefully this will let it better stop junk email.

This data is useful in that some areas of the world send a lot of spam outside their borders, but don't send a lot of legitimate email. Korea and China are two examples. They also happen not to purchase a lot of anti-spam mail applications.

Mind you, not all email from these countries is blocked. Like so many other factors, the email's origin is only considered by the fuzzy logic filter when rendering a final judgment.

There are also a handful of areas that produce a lot of junk email, but also some legitimate messages. These emails are placed under a bit tougher scrutiny by the filter, but certainly are not blocked purely on their origin.

When coming up with this list of geographical regions needing, "special attention" I assumed Russia would be included. Russia is somewhat legendary for having an internet mafia. Rumor also has it you can score some cheap MP3's from some sites they host.

However, my research indicates that these days, relatively little spam in fact originates from Russia.

So what happened?

My theory is that Russian spammers have graduated to the "next level." They've reached a point where they no longer have any desire to send spam using their own servers. Russian spammers control enough "zombie" computers, where they simply click a button, and spam starts coming from Texas, Canada, Yugoslavia and Germany all at once.

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