Less spam from Korea

Filed in archive Spam News on March 5, 2007

South Koreans have done their best to contain spam coming out and around their country. By applying innovative techniques nation-wide, Koreans managed to drop down the ladder in the Spamhaus infamous spam origin list.

As The Korea Times reports, the country dropped from third to sixth place in just two years, and is planning to further improve spam control, providing a role model for all nations worldwide:

"The progress coincides with government surveys, which show that Koreans received on average 5.3 unsolicited junk messages per day during the latter half of last year.
The daily figure was 13.8 two years ago, according to the Korea Information Security Agency.
'The all-out efforts to contain spam mail such as the sender policy framework (SPF) appears to work. The number of spam mails is expected to go further down this year' said Lim Jae-myung at the state-backed agency."

SPF is in fact a really nice technique which makes e-mail address spoofing a lot more difficult.

For once it seems that there is a way to lower, if not diminish, levels of spam. This makes me happy, but also wondering: Why doesn't the US implement such protocols, make them obligatory? We are, after all, the biggest spam producers in the world.