Good afternoon, all,

On Fri, 11 Nov 2005, OpenMacNews wrote:

Anyone have a list of what country domain extensions are fairly Ok to
block?

There's a politically charged question.
FWIW, most spam still comes from the US.

imho, it's not an issue of where most spam comes from, nor is it a politically 
charged question.

rather it's a pragmatic one: what % of email you rec'v/expect from any given 
country is spam?

e.g., as one of my clients (a) does no business with CN/KR, and (b) noted that 
~100% of email
rec'd from servers there was spam, adding:

I heard that same argument from a respected coworker; he asked the company owner whether we could _possibly_ do business with "Country S" now or in the future. Given an answer of "no" and the fact that we were receiving sustained attacks from Country S, he blocked the entire country.

A few years later I found myself teaching a perimeter security course _in the capital of Country S_, explaining to a classroom full of paying students that we banned the entire country for a number of months because - *gulp* - there was no possible way we'd ever do business with that country.

Here's another way to look at the issue. Lets say that you knew that a state/county/province in your own country had an inordinately low signal/attack ratio. Would you ban that region?

Can you ever be sure enough that you'll _never_ get a legitimate mail from that region? I've got one counter-example above.... If you really do believe you've got some political area with a sufficiently low signal/noise ratio, I'd suggest making an SA rule to _raise the score_, instead of an unconditional block.

One last note, Jerry. If you unconditionally blocked mail from .nl and .br, you'd have respectively blocked 688 and 258 (out of 56,910) posts from this list alone. One of which might someday have an answer you need. :-)
        Cheers,
        - Bill

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