Unlawful spam messages or phone calls can be reported to the ministry's anti-spam center at 02-1336 or at www.spamcop.or.kr.
[my emphasis]

Now, I know that nice Mr Linford (no relation - look, we're even spelled differently for heaven's sake) set up shop in China a while back and gave the world Spamhaus China *, but I don't seem to recall any press release announcing a new venture in Korea by Mr Haight or Ironport Systems.

spamcop.or.kr helpfully has an English language version though. Does it have any advice for me?

Blocking Korea Spam

Filtering

If a recipient does not want to receive spam originating from Korea, he/she can easily filter such mails through the filtering function provided by his/her e-mail service provider.

"@" Filtering

The Korean spam regulation will make it mandatory to label "@" in the subject of e-mail advertisements. The labeling of "@" in the subject is the way proposed by the Korean government to indicate an e-mail advertisement. Because e-mails easily pass international borders, using the "@" symbol is a more effective way for filtering spam in any country than using any other specific character. If someone sets the e-mail program to filter "@", they should be able to block most e-mail advertisements originating from Korea.

"Ã" Filtering

When someone opens an e-mail advertisement written in the Korean language, "Hangeul" on their computers, it may not be readable. However, the broken content may contain the block symbols. Therefore, if the e-mail program is set to filter those symbols, most spam originating from Korea can be blocked.

Rejecting

A recipient also can notify the sender of his/her desire to reject the receipt of an e-mail advertisement.

The Korean spam regulation stipulates that notification of how to reject the receipt of an e-mail advertisement should be included in its content in both the Korean and English languages. The notification of rejection may appear at the bottom of the content as "reject" or "refuse" button

Not so very helpful, then:

1. Did you ever see any email with an @ in the subject line to indicate a Korean ad? No. Me neither.
   
   
2. Yes, we could filter on Korean character sets (if that is what they mean and I think it probably is), but this does not address the basic problem of Korean spam which is this:
   
   Virtually all spam originating in Korea (at least originating at a malware proxy server on a domestic Korean DSL service) and sent to non-Korean victims is not sent in a Korean character set but in US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8. Filtering by character set (OK, other than Cyrillic) is simply not an option.
   
   
3. Reject button? I'd explain why this is nonsense, but I'm tired and you probably already know.

So far, so bad. There is however a report form for submission of Korean spam complaints.

I may just give it a whirl and see what happens.

* how's that going anyway?

Category: Spam miscellany
Technorati: Spam miscellany

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