From Russia with Love - 2006
By Dimitar Avramov

Are you a James Bond movies fan? If not I need to add some a few more words. “From Russia with Love ” is one of the popular Bond movies starring Sean Connery. His has been sent to a secret mission in Turkey in this episode.

But this article is not about James Bond and spy movies. It is about spamming.

Russian SPAM has become one of the most dangerous ones flooding your e-mail box. From ordinary advertising to different virus definitions it harms everyones mailbox and takes a lot of your time and ISP’s resources.

“Our business email address is being flooded by Russian spam, despite being filtered through SpamCop.net first. I can’t report the spam using WebMail as the messages are forwarded to our mail server, so the offending messages do not stay on the server. I have now started reporting the spam through my own “attachment forwarding” SpamCop account, but it still keeps coming”, posts Martin in a popular web forum.

A question to follow is “Why does this Russian spam keep coming?”. One of the possible answers is to do DNS blacklists and to adjust your SpamAssassin (if you have one installed) threshold downwards. You can change these settings in Options –> SpamCop Tools –> Select your email filtering blacklists.

I can read and understand Russian even I have nothing to do with this country. But Martin can’t. So he asks a good question “Can’t I just say I want no Russian language mail? I can’t read it anyway”.

The answer is “You can say it, but right now there is no way to implement it from within SpamCop.”

Another forum user writes “I also get a lot of Russian spam and have all of the BL’s selected. The problem is that it comes for too many different IP’s”. I can only add here that even if you blacklist all russian IP’s you will still continue receiving Russian SPAM. The simple reason is that most spamming messages come from United States IP addresses. American ISP’s have very strict TOS about spamming but hey can not block all IP’s.

Four years ago in 2002, a US researchers from Center for Democracy and Technology found that e-mail addresses posted on websites or in newsgroups attract the most spam. They estimated that up to 40% of global e-mail traffic is caused by spamming messages bringing headache for businesses, which are losing billions in productivity.

eWeek says that 86 % of spam sent to enterprises between May and July 2004 came from U.S. spammers, according to a survey by CipherTrust Inc. It sampled about 5 million pieces of spam sent to 1,000 e-mail boxes. Just 3 % of spam came from China and Hong Kong!

According to InternetWeek.com, “most of the spam sent across the Internet originated on zombie machines, hijacked computers remotely controlled by spammers.” Zombies, people! The Walking Undead! It sounds like a horror movie isn’t it?

But let’s get back to Russians. Here’s another post about Russian spam

“What’s the story with all the Russian spam of late? What is it that the Russians are trying to sell me? Do Russians worry about tiny penises? Do they play Texas Hold-Em online? Do they buy fake Rolexes? Do they like “dirty barnyard girls in all animal sex videos”?

I sure hope not. I’ve been using gmail for almost a year now and I love it. It’s spam filter is fantastic. You’d think they’d figure out by now that any email I receive in Russian belongs in the spam bin instead of my inbox.”

Someone who pissed off of “Russians with fake Rolexes” posted some advices of fighting Russian spam. Here they are:

For a quicker way of reporting a lot of foreign language spam (or any spam for that matter) that has been forwarded to your local inbox try the following:

- Set up IMAP as a separate link to your held mail.

- Clear out (delete) all mail in the held mail folder (you can skip this step if you want)

- Move all the foreign language spam from your local inbox to your IMAP SpamCop Held mail folder (click and drag). It takes it off your local machine and moves it back to the SpamCop server. No need to forward as attachment.

- Then log into either the VER interface Held Mail or log into Web Mail and select the Held Mail folder

- Select all or only those specific messages you want to report.

- VER gives you the option of quick reporting or full reporting

- WebMail only allows for quick reporting.

Hope this story will help to fight against Russian SPAM. If not you have at least 2 more choices - to start learning Russian language or to close your e-mail account.

About the author and the Blog

DawHB.com was launched on March 14th. The blog covers the web hosting industry, starting with newbie advise and extending to high-end issues. The blog publisher Dimitar Avramov has been in the web hosting industry since 1999, working as a CEO of a web hosting company and then moving to the website marketing and advertising business. He manages a network of web hosting, web design and web master related service directories that cover US, European and other regional markets.

More articles at dawhb.com web hosting blog (http://www.dawhb.com/)

Article Source: EzineArticles.com