Spam report of year 2008

The Devoracles servers handle the mail traffic for a few other domains as well. One of our biggest issue in 2008 was spam, our customers who we host the mail servers for were extremely revolted at a given time because of the servers’ inability of effectively catching spam. Later we successfully installed a spam firewall to reroute the emails which are suspicious to a spam blackhole. A spam blackhole is a simple e-mail address which is not used for anything else but to catch spam. The effect was quite dramatic, more than 98% of the spam was caught.

At the beginning of February we started to process the data regarding the source of the spam we’ve handled and the result was quite shocking.
Apparently there’s a myth lingering on the internet that the major source of spam is China; webmasters even ban the whole country because of this myth and seemingly this one of the biggest mistake they do! See the below list of the source countries, ordered by percent of spam received:

Spam source countries in 2008 (%)

1. Germany(DE): 18
2. United States(US): 18
3. Russian Federation(RU): 16
4. China(CN): 9
5. United Kingdom(UK): 6
6. Italy(IT): 5
7. Brazil (BR): 4
8. Ukraine(UA): 4
9. Netherlands(NL): 3
10. Ireland(IE): 2
11. Japan(JP): 2
12. India(IN): 2
13. Estonia(EE): 1
14. France(FR): 1
15. Georgia(GE) : 1
16. Indonesia(ID): 1
17. Israel(IL): 1
18. Korea, Republic of(KR): 1
19. Luxembourg(LU): 1
20. Qatar(QA): 1
21. Romania (RO): 1
22. Spain(ES): 1
23. Tunisia(TN): 1

The above data means that the top 3 spam sender country is the United States, Germany and the Russian Federation, and China is only on the fourth place. We really hope that this data will not cause webmasters to ban the above countries though.

For the visual-type people, here’s a neat graph:

Source of spam - 2008 (graph powered by Google Spreadsheets)