Block Asian spam with korea.services.net

Note: I do not run korea.services.net. I can't help you with getting removed from their list. Please contact them, not us.

If you have few or no legitimate contacts in South Korea, but are receiving Korean spam, the korea.services.net blacklist might be able to help.

The DNSBL korea.services.net allows you to block all mail from “most South Korean networks.” Due to the poor email reputation of most South Korean internet service providers (ISPs), the assumption is that most of the mail you'd receive from their servers would be spam, and that blocking mail from these networks therefore helps to reduce the amount of spam received.

From the site: “Beginning in late 2001, we started receiving vast amounts of junk e-mail (better known as spam) from Korean networks. Some of it was in Korean, a language that nobody here understands, some was in English. Despite repeated attempts to contact system managers to alert them to the problem, we never received even a single acknowledgment to any of our reports.”

The list was created in late 2001 or early 2002 by John Levine. In July, 2006, he posted this overview of his frustrations with Korean spam and his rationale behind creating the blacklist. John indicated then that the blacklist appears to be widely used, receiving hundreds of queries per second.

One thing I can't tell you is how well it works. I don't use it personally, and as of yet, I've done no study on how much of my spam load (which is immense) is received from South Korean ISPs. I do find John Levine to be respectable and trustworthy, so I have no reason to doubt his rationale or statements regarding the South Korean spam problem.

If you are finding your mail blocked due to a korea.services.net listing, there is probably not much you can do about it. Check out this listing of 203.252.1.151 as an example. The site estimates that somewhere between 1163844 and 38794800 spam delivery attempts were made to the blacklist's users in the past week. That means that the spam volume is so high from that network, that if it were removed from the blacklist, the list's users would be overwhelmed with a flood of spam.

It's a tough situation. If you're an end user of email services affected by the listing, you may want to switch to a non Korean-based email provider like a Google, Yahoo, etc., if you want to be able to send mail to people who use this blacklist. The korea.services.net site indicates that in the long term, networks have to get their spam problems under control before they'll be removed from the blacklist.

Please do not contact anybody here at dnsbl.com regarding a korea.services.net blacklisting. We do not run korea.services.net. A DNSBL is a type of spam filter, meaning that korea.services.net is just one of hundreds of anti-spam blacklists in the world – it does not mean that we own it or maintain it. We have no magic powers that enable us to stop you from being impacted by being listed on korea.services.net.