We’re getting more and more Russian spam. A hideous amount of it. For example, we had 10 of them getting through the gmail filter in less than an hour today.
We say spam, because we assume it’s spam as we didn’t ask for it to be sent to us, but mostly because we can’t read Cyrillic, so we’ve got no idea what it’s all about!
Others of you may not suffer from this problem to such an extent, but my own exposure may be for historic reasons.
A few years back, I was booked in to keynote at a Russian broadband/broadcast conference. The organisers of the event made the unfortunate decision to publish one of my email addressed on their Web site.
Russian spammer, and we suspect that there are a lot of them, obviously make the assumption that I’d love to know about all things Russian. I don’t and when it’s written in that language, I suspect I never will.
As with all spam, having to deal with this nonsense is stealing time away from me that I could be using to do other things with.
I’d love a quick solution to this.
The solution? Blocking languages
Hey Google mail/spam team, here’s an idea that would make you even more popular.
How about allowing people to make the decision to block _all_ email that are written in chosen languages? Like me and Russian.
Clearly this isn’t a racist thing, it’s just that there’s no point in presenting an email to someone who can’t make head nor tail of it.
It cannot be hard to implement this, especially when the alphabet used is so distinctive.
My list so far would be Russian and Chinese.
So Google-rs, please, please, please put it near the top of your, we imagine, very long list of updates.
Very good idea! But I use Enterto Spam Free Email and have only received 1 Spam in 1 year. They invented a new technology that almost ends Spam for good.