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> boxes. I'm beginning to realise that Africa once again equals > "junk". I wondered whether critical geographers who discover this > message amongst their spam would let me know so that I can get some > impression of the extent of this (obviously people who don't check > this occasionally will be lost I'll be happy to put my e-mail administrator hat on for a minute – I spent too many years on the front lines of the spam war. The reality is that most spam originates from outside the US. Spam these days typically comes from "botnets" – networks of machines that have been hijacked by viruses designed for distributing spam. This practice is a reaction to the fact that would-be spammers in the US and Europe have a really hard time keeping their connections – the provider cuts them off quickly when the start spamming. Many, if not all, of the largest Botnets are run by groups of hackers in Russia. There are a lot of factors that go into this. First, computers in the US and Europe tend to be better maintained (i.e. people running anti- virus software and staying up to date on fixes), which leads to proportionally fewer compromises by botnets. South Korea used to be a very problematic country, having the wonderful combination of poor computer maintenance and excellent connectivity. However, it's gotten much better in the past few years. Africa, although poorly connected, is responsible for about 1.6% of spam while the US is about 19.6% – proportionally, Africa generates way more spam per computer than the US does. All of that being said, the vast majority of spam filtering software is not so crude as to block continents or countries outright. Spam filtering works (generally) by pattern recognition. The assumption is (more or less correctly, I would add) that computers sending spam tend to behave differently from computers that do not and that spam tends to look different than real e-mail. There are a lot of techniques that go into it, which I won't bore people with. Anyway, coming back to the question of maintenance, I think a lot of computers in Africa (and the rest of the global South) are not as well maintained, which not only gets them compromised by botnets, but even legitimate mail can get trapped if the mail server it's going through isn't kept current on spam fighting practices. In other words, even the legitimate mail starts to look different from the e-mail originating in the rich world – and different is bad. Another thing I've personally noticed when getting e-mail from Africa (which obviously depends greatly on who's sending it) is that there tends to be more spelling errors, which again gets flagged as different. One of the techniques that is used is Bayesian statistical analysis of your e-mail, in which each incoming e-mail is compared to the statistical characteristics of e-mail you've gotten in the past to see if it's consistent. If you get lots of properly spelled e-mail, then misspelled e-mail looks different... BTW, very often e-mail providers will including information in the headers indicating what rules triggered a particular e-mail to get treated as spam. You have to look at the full headers to see this, although, sadly, it's often not the most intuitive information. Anyway, I've probably gone on too long as it is, but I hope this helps. Darrell