Buddha Buck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | At 05:06 PM 04-10-2002 +0100, Jack Campin you wrote: | >How come nearly all the spam this list gets is from Turkey? | > | >What have they figured out that no other spammers have? | | That's a good question. I've been curious about international spammers | myself, since I've been besieged with Chinese and Korean spam in my | personal mailbox (I took some Japanese at University, but I don't read | Chinese or Korean). I wonder why they chose me, and English-speaking | spammers haven't.
Hmmm ... It couldn't be the name, because that would just get you a lot of spam in Hindi, Urdu, Thai and Vietnamese. The main explanation is that there are a lot of poorly-run web sites in Asia (but not as many in Japan). A lot of them have "open mail relays" that will forward anyone's mail. Spammers look for these and use them until they're shut down. The site's managers are getting a lot of complaints in English (or French or Italian or whatever), but they often don't understand the messages, and don't do anything. This may not last for long. There was a news story last week about a problem being faced by the Chinese government. Although China as a whole doesn't have much Net access (and the government is trying to keep it that way), the government itself has become a heavy user. The Net is a good organizing tool. But Chinese officials have noticed that they are having more and more problems using email with the rest of the world. The reason is that organizations in the rest of the world (ISPs as well as governmental and educational institutions) have been installing filtering software that simply blocks all traffic from China. "We don't deal with anyone over there anyway; why not just block the entire country?" This is starting to impact the Chinese government. So they're looking at ways of fixing the problem. Of course, their "solutions" tend to be along the lines of what they've done to Falun Gong ... To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
