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U.S. is World Leader in Spam
adept256 writes "Sophos outs 'dirty dozen' spam producing countries. And the USA is in the lead by a country mile. 'The United States is far and away the worst offender, accounting for nearly 60 percent of the world's spam. Even though European countries are responsible for less spam, they are still generating millions of junk emails a day,' said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos."
This isn't who is writing the email is. It's where the computer that sends it out is. The article mentions that Russia should be higher on the list but a lot of SPAM is sent through compromised computers in America.
A lot comes from Asian computers, but if you look into the spam itself (what it sells -> who is actually selling it), most comes in fact from the US.
One of the most effective means of dealing with Spam & when being required to hand out an email address is Spamgourmet (http://www.spamgourmet.com). You create an account and can then use unique email addresses of the form ..@spamgourmet.com . The cool thing about this is that for each email received on this account the counter is decreased and once it reaches zero all further emails will be discarded. This is great to hand out if you're ordering something from an online store and only want to receive 1-3 emails for order confirmation/shipment but not get any future spams.
The service is free and offers a couple of other neat features. I've been using it for about a year and it's been very reliable.
Highly recommended.
Heiko
You might find this graph very interesting.