Spam News

Spam researcher shows China not as 'spammy' as you think

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

China gets a bad rap as the major source of source of spam, according to statistics analyzed by Microsoft email security researcher Terry Zink, who points out on his anti-spam blog that the U.S. is the "spammiest" country, pushing out nearly one-third of all junk emails.

But measuring the total amount of spam coming from different countries may not be the best way to determine how "spammy" a country is, Zink observed. So Zink ranked countries instead by spam per internet user.

"This normalizes the data," Zink explained. "Now a country with a very large population does not necessarily outrank one with a smaller population."

By this ranking, China does not even make the top 20 spammiest countries, while the Czech Republic ranks number one, with a spam per user rate of 4.38, followed by South Korea, Romania and the Netherlands, while the U.S. ranks fifth, with a spam rate of 2.01.

"China may send a lot of spam but Eastern Europe sure seems a lot more spammy than the Chinese," Zink wrote.

However, another way of looking at it suggests China is till the worst of the spammers. According to Project Honey Pot, China is the largest host of spam servers.