>Worked when I went there. > >As the employee of an ISP I see many drawbacks to blocking entire countries.
So do I. :) We have customers in quite a few different countries, and we certainly wouldn't choose to ban E-mail from any country. And most of our customers don't plan to ban mail from any country, either. The most common use seems to be with the weighting system in Declude JunkMail. That way, countries that lots of spam goes through, but not much legitimate mail goes through (such as Korea and China) can have a weight of "5" (as an example). That way, standard mail from those countries would go through without a problem. However, if they have other problems as well, the fact that they are from a "spam friendly" country may push up the weight so that the E-mail will get caught. And "caught" can even mean delivered to the recipient with "SPAM:" in the subject, not necessarily deleted. >Country blocking is just not feasible, nor do I >think it is a good idea even if it were. And that's why we waited until now to try to identify E-mail by the country/countries it goes through. Before, the tests were all pass/fail, so identifying the country would mean treating the E-mail as spam or legitimate mail based solely on the country. Now, however, it can be used in a manner that mail from those countries will normally get through, unless they are coming from open relays or broken mail clients or have other such problems (in which case their mail would likely get caught anyways on many servers). >While spammers are the Bain of the >entire web, that does not in my opinion constitute a good enough reason to >ban all traffic based on the country it comes from. And we would strongly discourage doing that. I don't think E-mail from any country should be banned. Note that with Declude JunkMail, mail can be delivered to the recipient in such a way that spam is filtered to a separate folder. That way, even if a company chose to "ban" E-mail from a certain country, the recipient could still receive it. But we would still recommend instead using the weighting system. Another way it can be useful is as an enhancement to our ROUTING test, which checks for very poor routing common in spam (for example, if someone in the United States sends E-mail to someone else in the United States, but routes in through China). A few short years ago, spam control was just using the RBL (or RBL and ORBS) tests to either add an X-RBL-Warning: header to the E-mail, or block it completely. Two tests, two actions. Today, however, there are over 65 publicly accessible spam databases and about a dozen different actions that can be taken on spam, so that spam doesn't have to be "lost" (like AOL does). --- Declude: Anti-virus, Anti-spam and Anti-hijacking solutions for IMail. http://www.declude.com --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Please visit the Knowledge Base for answers to frequently asked questions: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
