Top spammers and the return of Pakistani spam

I recently followed a link to this list of spammers responsible for 80% of all spam The list includes an ex-boss of mine for whom I briefly worked for while I was in Singapore (somewhere in the mid-90s, long before spam was a problem). He had always been a dubious character, but I never thought he’d stoop this low.

Usually, we think of places such as Turkey, Korea and China as the major sources of spam. Yet it is the US spammers that make up about 70% of this list.

I remember that some years back, Pakistan was notorious as being a major source of spam. Glad to see that it isn’t in this list. Could this really be due to stricter policies by the ISPs? I helped implement the blocking of port 25 about a year ago, while I was at Dancom and it really paid off. Other ISPs that took this issue seriously, also reported successes.

However, there has been a sharp increase in locally-generated spam that targets the local market and this doesn’t bode well for Pakistan. The current service provider market is facing cut-throat competition and strict policies, like the SMTP block, are the first to get the chop in favor of customer-retention.

At this rate, it won’t be long before we end up back on the list.