On 18 Aug 2025, at 02:53, Suresh Ramasubramanian via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
One old paper I remember talked about addressing pharmacy spam - they went after everything. Hosting, payments processors, shady manufacturers in India and China, mailing out the pills in ziploc bags taped inside a magazine and so on. But that was easier because it was a criminal enterprise in which multiple agencies could and did collaborate to stamp it out.
Exactly - follow the money, as it’s done for drugs, ddos and similar matters. It’s a really small sample but a while back I got curious on how the “Website/App Development” spam worked, so I started responding to every single spam email. Figured out they spam from Google/Outlook with a generic question / offer for development services, and only once you express interest they reach out with the actual company domain. After more than two years, and close to 150 emails received across my main address and multiple socks, I have a list of… 13 web development agencies in total. When you plot them on a map (red dots here - excluding hospitals: https://ibb.co/PGry1fsd) the majority is physically located in an 1km radius from each other. This is a simple case where chasing an extremely limited number of organizations (which also happen to fall under a single local police authority) would completely eradicate a typology of spam from the internet. Is it much in volume? Don’t know, but it’s definitely the primary type which breaches a range of spam filters. Giorgio