i’ve recently taken to blocking great swaths of IP addresses in foreign countries, which only send me spam.

she has HUGE… tracts of land…

i have undertaken this policy because using a utility that automatically blocks IP addresses from foreign countries costs money (😒) and using a utility would only work on hybridelephant dot com, and nowhere else.

so, i learned about CIDR, learned how to identify host countries based on IP addresses, and learned how to block IP addresses based on CIDR numbers…

now, instead of blocking a single IP address — which is pointless, because spammers know that a single IP address only works until the spamees figure it out and block it, so they move on to the next one — i block entire swaths of IP addresses: the most common are the /24 range, which blocks 256 (2⁸) IP addresses, and the /16 range, which blocks 65,536 (2¹⁶) addresses.

and i can block spam from those IP addresses on ALL of my domains, not just hybridelephant dot com. 😉

which brings me to the point of this post: i recently blocked the third IN A SERIES of IP addresses from bangladesh: now i have 185.222.56.0/24, 185.222.57.0/24, AND 185.222.58.0/24 blocked.

which, technically, means that i could block 185.222.56.0/23 and 185.222.58.0/24 with the same effect, because 185.222.56.0/24 plus 185.222.57.0/24 equals 185.222.56.0/23

i love that i am able to do this.

i also love that i am able to understand this as much as i do… which is not very much, but enough that i have been successful in reducing the amount of spam i get by a SIGNIFICANT amount, and not affected my legitimate mail in the slightest degree. 😈