Source: Technology Review

The above is a wonderful chart shows that China, Brazil and Turkey lead in generating the most unwanted messages. The graph generated by data from Team Cymru is a lot easier to read than their default Hilbert Curve graph.




Source: Team Cymru

But they also have some nice graphs as well.

www.team-cymru.org/Monitoring/Graphs/

(Warning – the above graphs are Flash based.)

How can we use this information?

Well, if you are based in one country and only expect to get e-mail from only a handful of other countries then you can use a region to IP address list to block all e-mail from the countries you don’t plan on getting any e-mail from.  You should, however, have an alternate method of contact like a web form so that people from these blocked regions can still reach you.

One great region based IP list can be found at http://countries.nerd.dk/ in a format suitable to use as a real time black list (RBL) via most mail server software.

- Shaun