Thursday, March 05, 2009

Why I am blocking China and who to blame

Today was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I have been getting spammed from China for years and years. I have blogged about this before and also pleaded with Chinese officials to crack down on their citizens who spam. I get approximately 100 or more spams a day from China. Most of these get stripped out by our spam filter but at least 20 get through. The one today was from sino5@cnmould.com or "Elva" at Sino Holdings Co., Ltd. www.sinogroupe.com. I have asked these distinguished individuals to stop spamming me before but they just cannot stop. Well, now you can blame them for me now blocking all *.cn traffic from my servers. Yes - you heard me correctly. I have configured many of my email accounts to take all email originating from a *.cn domain and drop it to devnull (meaning it will *never* be seen by a human being).

I hate to have to take this drastic action but spammers like Sino Holdings are to blame. They think it is their right to send out millions of emails to people every day assuming we are interested in their injection molding processes. This costs us money!!! Our economy cannot stand to see another 1-3% of people's productivity wasted every day and mobile costs racked up for emails going to our phones that we don't want.

At the same time I do this, I am going to make one more plea to the Chinese government to treat these people like the criminals they are. If not, others will follow my lead and legitimate businesses in China will suffer as they will not be able to communicate with us. This is not the economic time to risk such barriers to global trade and spammers are hurting us all.

If you are in China and wish to communicate with me by email for legitimate reasons, you cannot do this with a *.cn domain name and will need to find another way. I am also contemplating doing the same with *.ru and *.kr (Russia and Korea) as a way to force legitimate businesses to petition their government to clamp down. These three countries are the "Axis of Spam" due to lax enforcement of regulations. The governments really need to re-think how this will harm their economy as I am sure that spam filters already assign higher probability to emails originating from their countries.

Sorry for doing this but I had to. If you want to retaliate against someone, try Sino Holdings at the URL above. It is their fault. I am sure Elva will be happy to take your complaints.

3 comments:

  1. Have you tried greylisting? Seems to work well for us!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I was going to block the IP addresses but I do have many people I do business with over there and need to have their emails arrive okay. Most spammers use "cn" in the domain name suffix so filtering on that has already resulted in less than 3 spams yesterday (from teh 20 that get through).

    The spammers really put me in a bad place as their actions are harming legitimate Chinese businesses. I hope the powers that be in China start to recognize just how harmful the actions of these spammers are and do something about it.

    ReplyDelete

Do not spam this blog! Google and Yahoo DO NOT follow comment links for SEO. If you post an unrelated link advertising a company or service, you will be reported immediately for spam and your link deleted within 30 minutes. If you want to sponsor a post, please let us know by reaching out to duane dot nickull at gmail dot com.