Actually the spaminator map gets an up arrow. It’s the origin of the spam that disappoints.

Mailinator is an email service that by its nature receives a lot of spam. Using google maps they have now shown a map of where the most spam that they receive comes from. Unfortunately it’s got none of the “pirate” states I expected (e.g. Russia and other ex-Soviet countries).

20 sites are in the US, 1 each in Brazil, Czech Republic, Hungary, and one whose address is so spoofed that it claims to be in the middle of the ocean (IP = 1.2.3.4!). Perhaps the other “bad guys” filter out messages to mailinator or the snapshot I looked at was unrepresentative. However, it’s not what I expected.

Given that so many of these sites are in the US it also makes me wonder about the reported efforts of Microsoft, AOL, etc. to shut down spammers. I always thought that the reason the spammers could keep going was that they were far from US courts. Why, gitftplace.com is in Seattle, right under Microsoft’s nose. Interesting.