What's The Matter With Sunnyvale?

Where does all that spam come from? Here's a list of the top ten cities that we are blocking spam from.

	City	State/Country	Percentage of Total Spam
	Scranton	PA	2.58
	Chicago	IL	2.29
	Dallas	TX	2.00
	Sunnyvale	CA	1.81
	New York	NY	1.22
	Sao Paulo	Brazil	1.13
	Atlanta	GA	1.05
	Los Angeles	CA	0.93
	San Francisco	CA	0.88
	Newark	NJ	0.87

Scranton is the home of “Network Operations Center” (aka hostnoc.net/burst.net), a hosting service that has been criticized for over a decade for inadequate spam prevention. About 2.5% of all the spam that we block comes from this ISP. They are not a criminal spam organization themselves, but they are making so little effort to prevent spammers using their servers that they are consistently the number one spam source in the world. All of the other locations on the list are major cities where a Spammer might reasonably want to operate from, with one exception: Sunnyvale. We block more spam from Sunnyvale than we do from the whole of China. Sunnyvale? Twenty square miles of suburban sprawl nestling between the San Francisco Bay and the verdant shopping malls of Cupertino.  Is this an opportunity for the Cloudmark SWAT Team to leave our trendy South of Market loft space, leap on Caltrain, and just eighteen stations later reconfigure the spammer’s servers with a sledgehammer? It’s the stuff that dreams are made of. Sadly it is not to be. (Put that hammer down, Igor.) It turns out that almost all of that Sunnyvale spam is coming from a very respected email service provider. Once again, it is not the company itself that is sending out the spam, it is sent via thousands of dummy webmail accounts, probably operated from botnets. While a certain amount of abuse is to be expected in any free webmail service, this can be mitigated. For any email service provider, outbound spam filtering should be as important as inbound - which is of course why Cloudmark provides the leading solution for both.