For a very long time the #1 country top level domain (TLD) source for spammer registrations has been Russia. One of the primary offenders is mail.ru as I’m sure many of you are aware. For a while it seemed that .org addresses were the ones being abused, and then it was .info. Now it seems that China (.cn) is the new TLD of choice for spammers.

Here are email addresses that have been blocked by the Checkbox Challenge MOD on one of my boards:

+------+----------+
| TLD  | count(*) |
+------+----------+
| ru   |     1737 |
| com  |     1362 |
| cn   |      674 |
| net  |      562 |
| info |      239 |
+------+----------+

Here is the same query from my largest board (failed registrations only):

+------+----------+
| TLD  | count(*) |
+------+----------+
| com  |     5719 |
| ru   |     1006 |
| net  |      430 |
| info |      372 |
| org  |      220 |
+------+----------+

China does not show up on the “top five” list for that board, but it is in the top twenty and moving up. Oh, and one more fairly active board that I manage:

+------+----------+
| TLD  | count(*) |
+------+----------+
| com  |     1682 |
| ru   |      713 |
| net  |      238 |
| info |      235 |
| org  |      179 |
+------+----------+

And one last board, not very active but lots of registration attempts:

+-----------+----------+
| log_email | count(*) |
+-----------+----------+
| ru        |      821 |
| com       |      578 |
| net       |      225 |
| info      |      140 |
| org       |      113 |
+-----------+----------+

As before, .cn does not make the top five, but it is on the list and rising. It’s number seven on the list for that last board.